Brothers and Sisters
by La Guera
Summary: Curiosity killed the cat, and Danny Messer can't ever bring him back.
1. Chapter 1

Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places, and events are propety of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.

**A/N: **Contains spoilers for S1 and S2. Originally written for the Lyric Ficathon Challenge on Livejournal.

_And everything I can't remember_

_As fucked-up as it all may seem_

_The consequences that are rendered_

_I've gone and fucked things up again.-_"It's Been a While"--Staind

_Curiosity killed the cat, _Danny Messer would think later. _And no amount of satisfaction will ever bring him back._

He should have known better, really, than to meddle in affairs that didn't concern him. Sticking your nose in other people's business uninvited led to unpleasant consequences and uneasy explanations in the middle of the night, and so it was best to leave people to their secrets. That lesson had been learned hard and swiftly in the Messer household, first at the hands of his father, who smelled of scotch and high-class Cuban cigars, and later, at the hands of his older brother, Louie, whose hands were no gentler. By the time he was five, he understood that his father's whispered conversations behind closed doors were forbidden to his ears, and by the time he was twelve, he had learned the same about the skin mags and weed under Louie's mattress. _To each his own _was a mantra that had served him well for years and kept his guts on the inside when so many other kids had been losing theirs.

But for whatever reason, he let his guard down that night, relaxed the rule that had so faithfully stood him in good stead, and in all the days afterward, when images of Don's contorted face and haunted eyes followed him down into dreams and up again into sweat-dampened wakefulness, he would wonder why he had been so foolish. Maybe it was because it was Flack, and Flack was neither Louie nor his father, who were cruel and jovial by turns, mercurial as the Chicago winds. For all his swagger and bravado, Flack was easygoing and fair, and he never threw a punch where you couldn't see it coming.

Or maybe it was simply because he wanted to know, to peek behind the curtain like he'd always wanted to on the rare occasions he'd gone to synagogue with his father. The idea of knowing something he shouldn't was dangerous, yes, and over the course of time, his father and Sonny Sassone would show him just _how _dangerous, but he hadn't minded. Danger had always held an erotic thrill for him even in the prepubescent days of boyhood, when GI Joe had held his attention more than the swinging hips and rounded breasts of a New York doll. Before his prick had shaken off the slumber of childhood, the bizarre joie de vivre of risk had coiled in his belly, light and hot and dizzying as a hit of nitrous oxide. Later, it had migrated to opposite poles of his body, nested in the fillings in his teeth and in the fleshy skin of his balls, prickling and absurdly heavy. Sometimes after a fistfight in the park or at the basketball courts, his mouth would throb with spent adrenaline, and his balls would be high and tight against his body, cock straining and twitching restlessly against the fabric of his underwear. Risk made the world brighter in moderation, and it was good to partake once in a while.

Especially when the risk was safe. Like Don. He had called Don his best friend for three years, and as best friends went, Don was A-1A. He was always good for a beer or a game of pool at Sullivan's after shift, and before that asshole, Lessing, put him on intimate terms with Verizon and the callused pads of Mac's fingers, he had been a lock for pick-up ballgames across the street from the 14th. Flack was a guy who always had your back. He was the first one into a scene, and if the situation warranted, he was the last one out. He was purebred cop and all business, and you always knew where you stood with him, whether you wanted to or not.

Flack was bald-faced, balls-out honest, and yet, there were spaces he-Danny-could not touch, was not _allowed _to touch. He had heard Flack tell of cases from his years as a beat cop, and of embarrassing mishaps from his Academy days, but the in all of their conversations held over beer and cheese fries, he had never mentioned his family. Not the one in which he'd grown up, teething on the leather of his old man's badge wallet, and not the one he planned to have someday, all blue-eyed boys and dark-haired girls, and all of them toddling across the kitchen linoleum with saliva-smeared grins on their faces and his shield in their chubby hands. He had broached the topic a few times, joking mostly, but sometimes not, and he'd shot the line of questioning down with a single look. He'd quietly labeled the subject _discurso non grata_ and stuck to the safer topics of the Yanks and the Mets and the boneheaded doo-de-doots that usually fell into his lap at the end of a case.

He hadn't thought much of it at first, Flack's reticence to discuss either the family from whence he sprang or the family he would eventually sire. Rumor had it that Flack, Sr. was a notorious hardass, and hell, Danny's family were no great shakes, either. His father had been mafia muscle once upon a time, and until Louie spent his days building squares out of Lincoln Logs and Tinkertoys and reading Clifford the Big, Red Dogs books in the perversely named "sunroom" of the rehab hospital, he had buried Sonny Sassone's bodies. So, Danny could hardly fault him for wanting to throw dirt on the family plot and bury the skeletons all the deeper. He would have gone right on doing the same if his DNA hadn't turned up on a cigarette butt in a grave at Giants Stadium and thrown the Messer closet wide open.

Still, it struck him as funny, the way Flack wouldn't ever talk about what he wanted out of life beyond a cold beer and the Knicks to make a goddamned basket, if you fucking pleased. He had no intention of getting married or having a family, but he was not averse to regaling Flack with tales of his conquests.

_I'm tellin' you, man, _he would say between sips of beer. _This girl was a knockout, a fuckin' ten. Hips sharp enough to cut paper, and tits… _He'd allow his hands to mold her prodigious assets from the air in front of him, lips pursed in soundless appreciation.

_Yeah, well, all them assets ain't worth a shit if there isn't anythin' to back it up, _Don would counter, and sip his own drink.

_You mean, like brains?_

Don would snort and crunch a chip of ice between his teeth. _Naw, I don't mean like brains, Messer._

Comprehension would dawn then. _Aw, you mean like talent, _he'd say brightly. _Well, you ain't gotta worry 'bout that. The things this girl could do with her tongue…_

And so the conversation would go, he rhapsodizing about the oral dexterity of his latest paramour and Flack quietly listening, turning his glass in lazy circles on the table. Sometimes he would smirk at a particularly audacious embellishment of the female form, but often, he simply watched through half-lidded eyes and kept his counsel.

Eventually, the lengua-labial prowess of Cindi or Maxie or Debbie would hold no more charms for him. The act of remembrance was never as sweet as the act remembered, after all, and he'd lean forward in his chair, elbows propped on the cheap laminate of the table.

_What about you, Flack? _he'd ask, and push his glasses onto the bridge of his nose. _What gets you hard?_

Flack would only smirk and turn his glass in a slow, lingering circle on the table. _You don't need to worry about that,_ he'd say.

That was it. Nothing else. Not even an index finger extended from the chilled curve of his glass and a _You see that, Messer? The ass on that girl over there? That's what gets me hard._

When it came to his personal life, Flack was an utter enigma, and it drove him crazy. So maybe curiosity drove him to it.

It was the light that had drawn him here in the first place, wan and milky and spilling from the threshold of the detectives' bullpen. It had been unexpected at half-past midnight, and so he'd gone to investigate, folder tucked under his arm. Now, standing in the threshold with his elbow propped on the doorframe and his fingers grazing the flecks of sloughed skin from his eyebrows, he was torn between pity and incredulity.

The light was coming from Flack's desk, a bright, white pool that revealed the scene with unsentimental clarity. Flack was slumped at his desk, head pillowed on one arm. The other arm curled loosely around a large, white evidence box whose lid sprawled atop the desk like a dead insect, stiff and unsettling in the harsh light.

_Aw, buddy, what are you doin'? _he thought sadly. _You were s'posed to go home hours ago. The doc'd have a fit if he saw you now._

_Yeah, but did you really think he was gonna listen to the eggheads in the white coats, there, Dan? _Louie, gruff and cocksure. _He thinks with his balls, not his brains. Always has. No pussy doctor is gonna tell him how to do his job._

It had been three months since Mac had held Flack's guts together with some yahoo's filthy shoelace and some Marine know-how, and Flack was still a shade of his former self. Danny had gone to visit him at home after his release from the hospital and been appalled. His healthy, ball-busting friend was gone, and in his place had been a haggard collection of shadowed hollows and brittle angles, and Danny had wanted to cry. He was gaunt and sickly, and when he moved, it was ginger and palsied, as though his feet had forgotten the safe terrain of his apartment. He'd planned on asking him for a beer at Sullivan's, but that plan had withered on his lips the instant Don had opened the door. He'd wound up watching the Rangers game and trying not to notice the way Flack's t-shirt bunched in the concave hollow of his belly. Don had fallen asleep at first intermission, chin tucked to his chest, and Danny had left without a word, skulking out with a lump in his throat.

He'd hoped things would improve when Flack came back to work, but he was thinner than ever, and silent, a ghost drifting through the cramped aisles of the precinct in suits that had suddenly grown too large. He seldom joked, and when he did, it was brittle and weary, an act performed because he had always done it, and not because he enjoyed it. His eyes were dull, and he spoke only when he had to, and the first time Stella had seen him, she'd had to duck into the bathroom to pull herself together.

Danny was sure he knew exactly how she felt.

Flack had been approved for half-shifts last month, and though he'd been good about sticking to the schedule for the first week or so, Danny had known that it was only a matter of time before Superman found his cape. Sure enough, by the end of the second week, half-shifts had given way to full shifts and then some. Mac and Stella had pleaded with him to take it easy, but Flack wasn't having it. He wasn't a pussy, he insisted. He was a cop, for fuck's sake, and would they let him do his goddamned job? He came in tired and went home exhausted, sometimes leaning against the banister of the precinct stairs in a white-knuckled grip as he left.

_He's naked without that hunk of gold, _Louie pointed out with surprising practicality. _Just like you were the two times you had to give it up. Handin' your badge over to Mac was like havin' your heart pulled outta your chest or getting' your dick lopped off with a pair of pinkin' shears. You were a cop as much as a mad scientist. That's what you were, and you spent the duration of the investigations wanderin' 'round your apartment and wonderin' what the hell you was gonna do if you couldn't be that no more. Wonderin' and worryin' if you'd end up like me, a deadbeat with no prospects and a dirty name._

_Louie, that ain't-_

_The hell it ain't, _Louie said flatly. _That's your problem, Dan. You was always too damn sentimental. Anyways, if it was that bad for you, imagine how rough it musta been for him. Your pal was destined to be a cop since the day he was born and prob'ly before. Hell, it wouldn't surprise me none if the bit of jizz that made him in his ma's belly was stamped NYP fuckin' D. He grew up in the shadow of that shield, and you know how long them shadows can be._

"Yeah, I do, Louie," he muttered. "I surely do."

_Damn right, you do, _Louie reiterated unnecessarily. _You know how even the coldest and lightest shadows can chafe and burn. You spent your whole life runnin' from mine and the old man's. Your pal, there, he didn't run. He couldn't, and he let it swallow him, slipped into it like a second skin. That badge became his heart, and that gun became his prick, and he lost 'em both in that explosion. Word has it that he spent five days in a coma with a plastic tube crammed up his johnson and some Brunhilda sponge-bathin his balls. 'Course he'd want that damn badge back. It's all he's fuckin' got, and the sooner he gets it back, the sooner he can forget that some scumbag got one over on him._

Yeah, well, that didn't mean he was just going to stand there and watch him work himself back into the hospital. That badge would be worth a whole lot of nothing if Flack collapsed on the job or took one in the head because he was too weak to hold his weapon. What kind of friend would he be if he didn't look out for him?

_The kind that never once visited him in the hospital, _sneered an accusatory voice that reminded him of Sonny Sassone, and he flinched.

That wasn't fair. It was too soon, too hard on the heels of sitting in that same room with Louie. He'd floored it to the hospital, intent on holding vigil with Mac and Stella, and then he'd gotten there and seen Flack in that same room, white and still and shrunken beneath the thin hospital sheets, and he just couldn't. He kept seeing Louie there instead, with his eyes taped shut and plastic ventilator hose shoved down his throat in an obscene parody of a cock. The world had grayed dangerously around the edges, and the contents of his stomach had threatened a mass exodus onto the industrial linoleum. Then Montana had been hovering at his elbow, perky, nosy, annoying, blessed Montana. She had been his lifeline, his way out, and he'd reached for her with the panicky desperation of the drowning.

"Sorry, I'm sorry," he'd stammered when they'd reached the safety of the hospital parking garage. "I'm so fuckin' sorry." Slurred and helpless, the penitence of a drunk wept into the sleeve of a priest's robes.

Lindsay had thought he was talking about taking so long to offer her a ride home, and she'd patted his shoulder and offered him a sympathetic smile and assured him that it wasn't a big deal. He'd let her go on believing that because it was easier, and because he was too tired to explain. But the apology wasn't for her and never had been. It had been for Don, for being such a sniveling pussy.

_But you weren't sorry enough to suck it up and go back. Not for the twenty days he was there._

He pushed the thought away. What the fuck did it matter anyhow? He had gone to see him the day he got out, and yeah, he'd balked at how utterly wasted he'd looked, but he'd rebounded admirably if he did say so himself. He'd gone back a few days later with a sack of Chinese takeout for him and a tub of chocolate pudding for Flack's still-ravaged digestive tract, and they'd shot the shit and watched a spring training ballgame until Flack succumbed to sleep on the couch again. That had been their ritual twice a week until Flack had come back to the job, and then he'd backed off to let him sleep.

_Apparently, he needs more sleep, _his mind noted as he drew nearer Flack's desk.

Flack was snoring softly, and his outstretched hand twitched in the throes of a dream. _You collarin' a perp? _he thought ruefully, and reached out a hand to shake him.

His hand froze as he caught sight of the evidence box. It was turned at an angle so that all but the first letter of the name was visible. He blinked and swallowed and stared, and then the hand meant to rouse Flack rose dreamily to his glasses and pushed them onto the bridge of his nose.

_-LACK _was scrawled across the side of the box in wavering block letters, and Danny was willing to bet that the cop who'd written it there had been balancing it on his knees and gripping a cup of shitty station-house coffee in the other hand. He palmed his mouth and tugged on his lower lip with a too-dry palm.

_Hey! _cried Sonny Sassone inside his head. _Whatta we got here, Dan, my man? It looks like we got us a bona fide mystery. L-A-C-K. What's that spell, I wonder?_

Danny shook his head as he stared at the box. _Naw. Naw, it don't spell that. There's a thousand other things it could be-Black or Glack or Knick-Knack fuckin' Paddy Whack._ _It don't have to spell Flack. It's close, but no cigar and alla that. That's all. _He tried to swallow, but there was no spittle, and the effort was an audible click in the stillness.

_Yeah, maybe, _Sonny conceded, but he was too bright, too casual. _Maybe, Messer. If that's all it is, then there's no harm in lookin', is there?_

He rocked on his heels and scrubbed his nape with his palm. Sonny was a bastard, but he was right. There was no harm in looking. Chances were, it did say _Black _or _Glack, _and even if it did say _Flack_, it didn't mean anything. Flack had come from a long line of cops, and maybe one of them had gone down in the line of duty. There was an entire section of the evidence and records room devoted to police officers who'd had the misfortune to die before forensics and ballistics could offer them hope of justice. They gathered dust in a darkened corner, and every once in a while, one of the guys from the cold squad would pull one out for another look. Most of the time, the boxes were returned to their space no better for their absence, but sometimes, they got lucky. Maybe his own brush with the slab had prompted Flack to take up the cause of a fallen ancestor.

_So go on and look, _Sonny prodded, and now there was a wheedling note to it. _Then you'll know, and you can get the fuck outta here._

Still, he hesitated. Because-

_Because it's none of your business what he's lookin' into, _Louie supplied. _Maybe he's investigatin' the death of a relative, and maybe he's lookin' at the murder of an old lady named Edna Glack. Either way, it's nothin' to do with you. Leave it alone and mind your own. Wake him up and take him home, for fuck's sake._

He reached out with the intention of doing just that and inexplicably found himself turning the box to the light.

"Oh, fuck," he said, and took a step back. "Oh, Jesus." He scrubbed furiously at his nape.

_Flack, Diana E. 60-H-1093. OCT93_, the box told him matter-of-factly, the black ink stark and pitiless against the scoured-bone whiteness of the box.

He scrubbed his face with his hands and slipped his fingers beneath the lenses of his glasses to press the frozen pads against his throbbing, disbelieving eyes.

_It's nothin', _he told himself. _It's just a coincidence. Flack's old man didn't corner the market on that surname. It's just somebody with the same last name. Weird, yeah, but not impossible, and certainly not _Twilight Zone _material._

_Then what's he doin' here after midnight? _insisted Sonny Sassone. _You don't burn this much time and energy on a fuckin' stranger._

All right, so Sonny had a point. Still, there had to be an explanation. Just because the name on the box was female, that didn't mean it wasn't a cop. The department's good old boy network, while still flourishing in scattered, festering pockets throughout the precincts and shadowy bars frequented by cops past their prime, had been steadily losing its grip over the past twenty years. His graduating class at the Academy had boasted twenty-two women, and word had it that before Stella wore a labcoat, she'd been a hard-scrabble Vice cop with a bigger set of ghoulies than most of the men. So, it was entirely possible-and, indeed, quite probable-that Flack, Diana E., had been a broad in blue.

He racked his brains in an effort to recall any mention of another Flack, either from Don himself or from the older purveyors of departmental scuttlebutt, but came up empty. There was a Wall of Heroes down at One Police Plaza that listed all officers killed in the line of duty since 1900, but he had never paid it much attention, preferring not to dwell on the alarming proximity of his own mortality. Now he wished he had. He made a mental note to check the wall the next time he found himself at HQ. If her name was listed, then it would explain everything.

_And if it ain't? _prodded Sonny viciously. _Then what?_

Then nothing. If it wasn't, he'd just let it go.

_Bullshit, _Sonny scoffed. _You ain't never gonna let this drop, Messer. That was always your problem when you was comin' up. You always had to know things that were none'a your goddamned business. That's why your old man was always kickin' your ass and smackin' you in the fuckin' mouth, and why Louie stayed the fuck away from you once he got in. They knew you couldn't keep your mouth shut. You knew you weren't supposed to be listenin' at your old man's door, but you squatted there anyways in your socked feet, idly jugglin' your plums with your ear pressed to the door. Sometimes, you heard nothin', and sometimes you heard him stickin' it to your ma, and sometimes, you heard your old man talkin' on the phone to his cronies. Whatever you heard, you usually wound up with a fat lip for your pains._

_When you got older, you made the mistake of askin' Louie 'bout what happened after he chewed your ass for getting lippy. You asked him if he ever made it to Atlantic City, and he blackened your eye for you, called you a smartass. He left soon after that, packed a duffel bag and lit out for parts unknown. He saved you from your own sorry-ass curiosity, but he ain't here to do that now, and you can't stop yourself. You never could. You're askin' for trouble stickin' your nose in that there box, and you don't know enough to fuckin' care._

_He's right, Danny, _Louie said, and there was a gentleness in his tone that Danny hadn't heard since he was a kid, snot-nosed and toddling after him in Louie's hand-me-down clothes. _You were always a curious little bastard. Remember that time you took my remote-control car apart the day after Christmas to see what made it go? Dad kicked your ass for that 'cause that stupid car cost him sixty easy. I'da kicked your ass, too, if you hadn't looked so goddamned miserable, flushed and bug-eyed, with snot danglin' from your nose and glazed on your upper lip. I just gave you two for flinchin' and called it even._

_That's why you got into science. You liked to see what made things tick, knowin' why things was the way they was. It's why you went after Aiden even though she was outta your league, and why you're always askin' Mac out for drinks even though he turns you down every time. They both played things close to the vest, and that intrigued you. It was the thrill of the chase that got you hard. The conquest was almost an afterthought. _

_It's too late for Aiden, God rest her soul, but Mac is still here, and you're convinced that if you get him lubed up enough, he'll unbutton the Marine coat he never really took off and let you see what's under that cold, white skin. It's a longshot, but the only losers are those who never take a gamble in the first place. Flack's the same way now that you think about it, all buttoned-up and secretive behind that smile and those mother-of-God ugly ties he wears. You wanna see what he's hidin' even though you know you shouldn't, because as the old public service announcement always says, _Knowledge is power.

_Leave it alone, Danny, _warned the voice of his conscience, his personal Mac who piped up now and again. _Flack never asked you a single question about Louie while you were at the hospital. The least you can do is extend him the same courtesy._

As usual, Mac was absolutely right. "You're right, Mac," he said, and laced his fingers behind his head. "You're absolutely right. I'm just gonna put the box the way I found it, and then I'm gonna pretend I didn't see nothin'".

He leaned over the corner of the desk, his torso scant inches above Flack's back, and shifted the box. The movement caused the topmost page of Flack's desk calendar to bulge obscenely, and he flattened it with his palm.

Flack jerked in his chair. "Fuck!" he shouted as the back of his head struck the bony plate of Danny's sternum, and then his feet were pedaling the wheeled office chair away from the desk. "What the fuck-," Sleepy and dazed, and his hand was fumbling for his sidearm.

"Hey, whoa, whoa, there, Don," Danny wheezed. His hand curled into a tight fist against his sternum, and his knuckles kneaded the tender spot where the back of Flack's head had made contact. "Take it easy. It's just me." His other hand braced him against Flack's desk.

The hand groping for his gun stilled, and his other hand cupped the back of his head. "Messer? Jesus Christ. What the fuck are you doin', loomin over my desk like a perp lookin' for lovin?"

Danny snorted. Fuck you, Flack. You ain't my type." He forced himself to stand upright, and his solar plexus throbbed in protest. "I was passin' by on my way out, saw the light, and thought I'd take a look. You all right there?"

Flack prodded the back of his head. "Yeah, I think so. What time is it anyway?"

"Quarter to one."

"Shit." Flack rose from his chair, and the hand massaging his scalp dropped to his side and pressed just above the hip. "I was workin' an old case. Guess I musta fallen asleep."

"Your side still hurtin' ya?" he asked. Casual, but laced with the faintest tinge of concern.

"Naw, naw," Flack said quickly, and moved toward his desk. "Naw, I'm good. "It's just-the doc says I got some scar tissue that might pull for a while." He gathered a stack of papers from his desk and placed them into the box.

_Why you lyin' to me? _Danny thought sadly. Flack always talked faster when he was bullshitting, as though his mouth thought to outpace the harsh light of truth, and his hands always danced and fluttered. _You know I got your back. Just like you had mine when I went off the rails with the fuckin' Minhas shootin.'_

"Didn't the doc give you somethin' for the pain?"

"Percocet or some shit," he said dismissively. "I stopped takin' it as soon as I got out of the hospital."

_Of course you did. Stubborn bastard. That explains why you were movin' so gingerly that first time I stopped by your place. Probably hurt like a motherfucker, and I wouldn't be surprised if that's why you're getting real acquainted with the walls and backs of chairs around here._

"Well, you know, if they're helpin' you, maybe you should-,"

"What are you, my fuckin' mother now?" he snapped. "I ain't turnin' into a fuckin' skel on account of that Lessing asshole. 'Sides, I can't be on that shit and interrogatin' perps. Might miss somethin'." He picked up the lid of the evidence box and placed it reverently atop the box.

Danny held up his held in a placatory gesture. "Hey, all right. No problem. I'm just…just tryin' to return the favor here." He pushed his glasses onto the bridge of his nose and fought the urge to fidget.

Flack paused in the act of smoothing the top over the box and looked at him for the first time. Exhaustion smudged beneath his eyes like soot, and his cheeks were sharp hollows. In the wan light of his desk lamp, his skin was nearly translucent.

"Return the favor?" he echoed softly, and his brow furrowed in confusion.

Danny nodded, a single, fluid bob of his head. "Yeah. For bein' there durin' the Minhas…thing."

_Thing._ Such an innocuous word for the first event that had nearly shattered his career. So neat and deliciously vague, a word that denoted casual unimportance, a spot of bother that could be cleared up with a minimum of fuss. It was safe and sterile and devoid of any emotional investment. He wondered how long it would be before he started referring to Louie's savage beating as the Louie…Thing.

_You already got a Louie Thing Messer. It sits up there in the rehab hospital and wears your brother's face. It eats pudding and drools with your brother's mouth and does both imperfectly. Sometimes when you go visit it, it's sittin' in the rec room and tryin' to match the shapes to the holes in the box, and ain't that a bitch, because the thing wearin' his face can't seem to make his hands work properly. They're jerky and wobblin', like that spastic retarded kid you used to see limpin' up and down the steps of PS 321. A bunch'a the other kids used to ride his wrinkled, mutant balls and throw rocks at his ass as he wobbled his way down the street. You never did-you were a candyass even then-but Louie did, and you never had the balls to step up to him. You go and look at him now, slurrin' like a drunk and pickin' up Duplo blocks with hands turned to claws, and you wonder if it's that kid's Divine retribution, if he ain't out there somewhere with your brother's old yearbook photo taped to a cheap voodoo doll, stickin' pins in his head and laughin'._

_Funny thing about the creature wearin' your brother's face, though. It ain't just the hands and tongue that's fucked up. It's the mind, too. He don't remember things he should. There are gaps in his mental photo album, and they come and go. Sometimes, he remembers everything and can talk for hours about the sorry-ass Mets or the rack on the day nurse or that time you tag-teamed the Battani twins at Coney Island, and those are good days, fuckin' A days._

_But there are a lot days-too many, in your opinion-when he doesn't remember anything. Days like that, you walk up to him, and he just stares at you with vacant eyes and drool on his chin. You don't wanna, but you wipe it off-he's seven years older, and you're fuckin' wipin' drool offa his face like he's a fuckin' helpless toddler-and then you sit in front of him in that hard plastic chair and talk until you're hoarse in the hope that somethin' you say'll jog his memory, but it ain't no use. He just stares with that glazed, faraway expression, and occasionally he smiles at somethin' just outta your range of vision. On the really bad days, he don't remember your name or his name or Pop's, and on those days, you run with your tail between your legs._

_Shut the fuck up, Sonny, you bastard, _he thought savagely, and swiped the back of his palm beneath his nose. This wasn't about Louie. He couldn't help Louie anymore, and maybe he never could, but maybe he could still do something for Flack.

"Oh." Flack's lips curved in a gentle, tired smile. "That wasn't anything special, Messer, you fuckhead. That's what friends do."

_Oh, yeah? Then why the hell did Mac hang me out to dry? He stuck his fingers in your guts and cut deals with God for your life. But me? I was a throwaway, a threat to his precious fucking lab, and he'd'a thrown me under the bus if push came to shove. If that's what friends do, then where the fuck was Mac when I needed him?_

"Here, lemme help you with that," Danny offered as Flack picked up the evidence box.

"I got it," Flack snapped, and pivoted the box out of his reach. Then, more softly, "I got it, all right?"

Danny ran his fingers through his hair. "Yeah. Yeah, okay. Sure."

Flack carried the evidence box out of sight, held in both hands as though it were a sacred artefact. When he returned five minutes later, he plucked his jacket from the back of his chair and draped it casually over one shoulder.

"Hey, so, you wanna grab a drink at Sullivan's?" he asked.

Danny started to protest that sleep would do Flack much more good than booze, but changed his mind. Getting out of his cramped apartment for something other than doctor visits and appointments with the department shrink would do him some good, too.

"Yeah, all right. You mind if we take a department car instead of walkin' or takin' the subway?" Flack narrowed his eyes, no doubt convinced he was being kid-gloved again, and so he hastily added, "In case you haven't noticed, Flack, it's hotter than a stripper's silicone tits out there, and you might be Superman and alla that, but me? I'm all for the air-conditioning."

Flack laughed. "Yeah, okay, Messer, you pussy. Wouldn't want the ladies to see your pit stains. Fuckin' metrosexual."

Danny grinned and started for the door. "'Least I'm bringin' the ladies to the dance. How long's it been since you've had a woman in your apartment?"

"A gentleman never kisses and tells, Messer. 'Sides, it's called standards."

"Standards, my ass. You're just a picky bastard," Danny retorted, and then he was gone, striding down the hallway toward the vehicle requisition lot.

Ten minutes later, they were in an Avalanche, windows rolled up and air-conditioning a dull roar in the cabin. Danny's fingertips were already blessedly numb as they curled around the steering wheel, and he was sure he could see the air as it eddied and whorled from the vents, an amorphous impression of form that refused to coalesce. Flack sat in the passenger seat, arms folded across his chest and forehead propped against the cool glass of the tinted window. Now and then, his fingers would knead the spot where cold surgical steel had met vulnerable flesh, soothing remembered pain.

_You ask him about it, and you'll be drivin' yourself to the oral surgeon's with your teeth in your pocket, _Louie warned, and so he kept his mouth shut and his eyes on the road.

Despite his earlier resolve to let the matter drop, he found himself thinking about the name on the evidence box as he drove. _Flack, Diana E. _formed in the dust motes that danced in his high beams and in the lazy whorls of cold air inside the SUV. He wondered who she had been and why she was so important to Flack, and how she had died in the fall of '93. From the corner of his eye, he saw him rubbing his side again, broad, white fingers petting the uneasy flesh beneath his shirt.

The epiphany, when it came, was so startling that he slammed on the brakes, and the SUV screeched to a halt on the howl of tortured rubber. Flack jerked forward in his seat, the nylon of the seatbelt cutting into his shoulder and midriff.

"Ah, fuck," he shouted, and dug frantically with his thumbs to relieve the pressure on his abdomen. "What the fuck is _wrong_ with you?" he hissed, and tugged at the belt.

Danny didn't answer him. He was too busy grappling with the enormity of the possibility that had presented itself.

_Maybe he's been married before. It would explain why he never wants to talk about settlin' down or havin' a wife and kids. Who wants to talk about what they lost and open up old wounds? _

His imagination, which usually devoted its formidable powers to crime-scene reconstruction or whether or not the girl at the Starbucks counter was wearing silk panties, wove a scenario of stunning clarity. He could see Flack in his mind's eye, a fresh-faced rookie with a crisp, blue uniform and polished black shoes. The bill of his cap was stiff and well-oiled, and his equipment belt was in perfect order-gun and nightstick on the left, radio and cuffs on the right, spare cuffs on the right rear. He was an A-1A rookie with a perfect pedigree.

He was twenty-two and married, living on the Lower East Side with his junior-college sweetheart in a shitbox apartment with more roaches than amenities. Their bedroom was just big enough for the two of them to sidle around in, but they made the bedsprings sing on most nights, and there was coffee and a goodbye kiss in the morning before he trotted down the front steps and headed for the precinct, whistling as his shoes clicked on the pavement.

Maybe they'd talked about starting a family, joked about baby names while they flipped through the TV channels and played gentle grabbass to the canned laughter of David Letterman. Maybe they even had. Maybe the EPT had come back positive in the days before October of '93, and maybe they had spent a few months reading baby magazines and trying to figure out a workable budget on a rookie cop's salary.

And then, boom, all gone. Just like that. Danny had seen it before from both sides of the microscope. During his stint as a beat cop with the 31st, he'd responded more than once to an Aided where some poor bastard had just dropped where he stood, victim of an aneurysm or a heart attack. Later, when he'd traded his blues for a white labcoat, he'd come face to face with victims who came home to find love dead on the floor or sprawled in the bathtub with their underwear around their bloating ankles. He knew how fast it could go on you.

_If there's an evidence box at the PD, she did not go gently into that good night_, the voice of logic pointed out.

"Yeah," he murmured to himself. "Yeah."

"Messer. Messer!" Flack had undone his seatbelt and was snapping his fingers in front of his face. "Dammit, Messer, you havin' a fuckin' seizure or somethin'?"

Danny blinked and shook himself. You, uh, you ever been married?" he asked suddenly.

"What?" An eyebrow rose in confusion. "What the fuck are you talkin' 'bout? You havin' a breakdown on me?" Flack peered closely at his pupils.

He shook his head. "Naw, naw. Just…have you ever been married?" he persisted.

"No, why? You proposin'?"

Danny shoved him good-naturedly into his seat again. "You ain't my type. And you need a Tic Tac."

"Then why are you askin'?" Flack reached for his seatbelt.

"Nothin'. You just never bring it up, is all."

"What? My personal business? That's why it's called 'personal business'. Now, are we goin' to the bar, or you wanna play Freud some more?"

Danny took a deep breath and started driving again. "Sorry. Thought there was a cat in the road," he said lamely. Flack snorted, but said nothing.

Sullivan's was all but deserted by the time they arrived. Most of the cops who frequented it had either gone home or on shift, and last call was in little more than an hour. A barmaid slouched from table to table, wiping condensation rings from the surfaces with a ragged dishtowel, and behind the bar, the bartender was wiping down cocktail glasses with bored familiarity.

He thought Flack would make a beeline for the bar and the big-screen TV like he usually did, but instead, he slid into a booth furthest from the bar and let his head loll against the back of the seat at a dangerously obtuse angle.

"Seen enough Sportscenter to last the rest of my goddamned life," he said by way of explanation, and turned his head to stare out the grease-smudged window at the street and the blurred reflection of the neon sign in the glass.

_Everything's changed since the last time he was in here, _he thought as he trudged to the bar. _The last time he was here, we were all here, raisin' a toast to Aiden and swappin' stories about how great she was. I was halfway to smashed that night, and he drove me home. He still had all his guts then, and Mac wasn't havin' nightmares about dead Marines. Stella still thought Frankie was Prince Charmin. Louie was already in the hospital, but there was still hope. Everything had gone completely to shit, and I remember thinkin' that maybe we gotten through the worst of it. I shoulda known better. Bad news always comes in threes._

He was careful not to look at Aiden's table as he returned to the booth with two longnecks and a Manhattan. He'd thought of it as Aiden's table ever since they'd raised their glasses and bottles in her name, and though he could not stand to sit at it himself anymore, he bristled whenever someone else did.

He slid Flack a beer and set the Manhattan in front of him. Flack picked up the beer and took a long swallow, and Danny sat down to nurse his own in silence. They did talk eventually; sports, mostly, or the hot redhead Danny had spotted while working a scene in the Bronx. Anything but the way Flack's free hand kept stealing beneath the table to nurse a private pain. Flack sipped his Manhattan and chased it with sips of beer, and Danny watched him closely all the while.

It was all right at first. The booze loosened him up, and soon, he was showing glimmers of his old self, leaning forward with his elbows on the table and stirring his cocktail with his index finger instead of the dinky, red straw. He even managed to get vehement about the Rangers, slapping his palm on the table when he wanted to emphasize a particularly heinous bit of dickery by team management. It was turning into the best night out in a while.

And then his fool tongue ruined everything.

"So, what was that case you was workin' when I found you?" he asked.

"Case?" Flack smiled and dipped his fingertip into his cocktail glass.

"Yeah, you said you were workin' an old case."

"Oh. That. It's no big deal. Just an old file I'm lookin' at." He was still smiling, but it was fixed now, and his eyes were flat and guarded.

"Why you diggin' up old bones when you got fresh bodies every day?"

He shook his head, brought the glass to his lips, and drained the contents in a single gulp. "It's just somethin' I gotta do. Leave it alone, Messer."

"Talk to me here. If it's an old case, maybe I can help you out. I am a science nerd and alla that."

Flack set his glass down on the table and stood up. "I gotta get home," he said abruptly.

"I can drive you." He made to rise.

"No." Sharp, desperate. "No. I can take a cab. There are still some things I can do for my fuckin' self."

"Hey, c'mon, Flack," he called as Flack turned to leave. Why won't you talk to me here?" Then, when Flack gave no sign of acknowledgement, "I saw the name on the box."

Flack froze and slowly turned to face him again. "Did you?" he said quietly, and his mouth twisted in a bitter grimace. "'S that why you asked if I was ever married?"

Danny nodded.

"I was sixteen in the fall of '93."

"Who was she?"

"Leave it alone. I'm tellin' you. Just let it go. She ain't your business." Dangerous and pleading at once. "Just let it go," he repeated, and then he was walking away, hand pressed to his side.

He should. He really should, Danny decided as he watch Flack limp into the summer heat. But he couldn't, and in the end, he didn't.


	2. Voyeur

Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places, and events are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.

**A/N:** Contains spoilers for S1 and S2.

It was two weeks before curiosity's belled cat came calling again, slinking around the soft, rounded edges of his resolve and patting at its fissures with sly, insistent paws. He tried to tell himself that it was Flack's fault, that if he didn't want him wondering about his business, then he shouldn't be so secretive, but deep down, he knew it was just a bullshit excuse. Shame burned in the pit of his stomach like an ulcer, but he wanted to _know_, and so he watched and waited and told himself that he was just looking out for a friend.

Flack had withdrawn from him completely since the night at Sullivan's. He spent most of his time at his desk at the precinct, and when he was called out, he kept his head down and spoke to him only when professional courtesy demanded it. Danny had asked him over for pizza and a ballgame, but he'd shaken him off with a vague promise to hook up later, and Danny had not asked again.

Mac had noticed the quiet and had taken to watching him and Flack from the corner of his eye whenever they worked a scene together. His concentration never wavered; Mac would never compromise a scene through inattention, but Danny could always feel the scrutiny, a gentle weight on the nape of his neck and in the hollow between his shoulder blades, a maddening itch he could never quite reach. It made him nervous and irritable, and only the knowledge that it would be a stupendously bad idea kept him from rounding on Mac and demanding to know what the hell he was looking for.

_You should be used to it by now, him breathin' down your neck, _said Louie. _He's been doin' it since Minhas got his dirt all over your service record, ridin' your ass every chance he gets and waitin' for you to fuck up and endanger his precious lab again. It got worse after your ghosts turned up in someone else's grave. He tells you he never believed you were a murder, but you know he's lyin' 'cause he never looks you in the face when he says it. He's always lookin' at your shoulder, searchin' for the tattoo you never had the balls to get, but that itches beneath your skin all the same._

He should have been used to it, but he wasn't, and he wasn't ever going to be. His wounds never really heal; they simply fade into the subcutaneous layers of his skin and linger there. He hadn't seen the black eye Louie gave him for asking about Sonny and Atlantic City since four days after he got it, but he knew it was there. He could feel the tender, swollen flesh there if he prodded it with his fingers. The same went for his lips, which his old man had bruised and split on numerous occasions. His mouth perpetually tasted of blood. If he bothered to look into a mirror, it would tell him that the bruises and scars were no longer there, but the mirror lied, and it did not live inside his skin.

So, he went through his days with all his scars hidden beneath his skin, and the ones left by Mac hurt the most. They throbbed and wept without end, and they were the easiest to raise to the surface again. Mac was the first guy to ever believe in him. His father and his brother had written him off as a loser, and most of the cops in the precincts and at One Police Plaza had figured him for a bad apple who'd wash out within a couple of years, but Mac had seen something in him worth looking twice at and had recruited him for the lab over the objections of the department bigwigs. Fuck if he knew what had caught Mac's eye. In truth, he was afraid to find out in case it turned out he was just a reclamation project, but he'd never forgotten that Mac had given him his first real shot at doing something useful, something that made more of a difference than rounding up skels on Friday night and seeing them on the street again Saturday morning.

So he'd busted his hump for Mac, done his best to do right by him. On the night before his first day in the field, he'd sat up all night in his tiny apartment kitchen, organizing and inventorying the contents of his field kit, and when he'd finally gone to bed in the wee hours of the morning, he'd had nightmares about opening his kit next to a vic, only to find it empty or the swabs covered in blood. He'd double-gloved that first day out, and he'd still worried about the possibility of cross-contamination because his hands were sweating so badly. The gloves had come away with a gelid, sucking sound when he'd peeled them off later, and he'd flushed with embarrassment as he dropped them into the metal trashcan marked _Biohazard_ in forbidding, black letters.

It had gone okay for a while. More than okay if he showed modesty the door. They had, in fact, been fucking great. The science of murder fascinated him, and Mac was consistently impressed with his work. Instead of hearing what a fuck-up he was, there were pats on the back as Mac passed him in the lab and quiet "Good work, Danny"s after he gave a report. The world had felt a little more solid under his feet, and then Mac had told him that he was on the promotion grid. Mac had sounded so proud, and he himself had been over the moon. Finally, he was on his way up.

Then that scumbag, Minhas, had leaped out of the closet like a bogeyman, and everything had gone to shit. IAB had looked at him long and hard for the murder of a fellow cop, and Mac had refused to look him in the eye anymore. He'd simply called him into his office and told him in a flat, mechanical voice that he was off the promotion grid. No "I'm sorry to tell you this, but-," no "We'll get you through this," just the calculated, pitiless pronouncement of his fate. The fall from grace had been quick and ruthless, and nothing had been the same since.

Prodigal son or not, he knew Mac well enough to know that he wasn't just going to sit on the sidelines and watch forever. Right now, he was being a good Marine and taking in the lie of the land, but when he was ready, he was going to ask hard questions, questions to which he had no answers.

_And what're you gonna tell him when the questions come, huh, Messer? That you think good, dependable, solid, commendations-out-the-ass Flack has a story he'd prefer not to tell? That you think he had a relative he lost that he doesn't wanna talk about? That you two are fightin' like a pair of teenage girls 'cause he doesn't wanna let you in on the dirty family secret? The level of irony there would be too rich for his blood, considerin' you been hidin' Louie for years._

He shrugged unconsciously as he strode in the direction of the evidence room. He wouldn't know what to tell Mac until he knew what he was dealing with, and there was no guarantee that he was going to tell him squat. Right now, this was between him and Flack and his insatiable curiosity.

He turned into the evidence room and ambled to the registration window, hands stuffed into the pockets of his labcoat.

"Hey," he said to the grizzled cop behind the counter. "You got the evidence for a case 60-H-1093, a Flack, Diana E?"

The man grunted in response and shambled into the labyrinthine warren of dusty evidence boxes and crumbling, yellow file folders, scratching the sagging seat of his uniform pants as he went, and Danny wondered if he was getting a glimpse into his own future. The thought made him shudder.

The man returned with the box and shoved a clipboard through the window. "Sign here," he muttered. Then, "'S funny, you know? Eight years, and Detective Flack's the only guy who ever checks this box out, and now you're here."

"That right?" Danny replied as he scribbled his signature on first available line of the logbook. His tone was casual, but his ears pricked to attention.

"Oh, yeah," the clerk replied expansively, and tugged on the waistband of his pants. "Used to come here four times a year like clockwork. Now, it's all messed up. Comes all the time." He pushed the box across the counter.

Danny dropped the pen and took the box. "Four times, huh?"

"Yeah. Lemme see-January 15th, March 12th, October 31st, and December 25th. He drops by on Christmas even when he ain't on the duty roster."

"Yeah, well, thanks." He put the box beneath one arm.

"Sure, sure," the clerk said amiably. "Hey, lemme know what's so goddamned interestin' in that box."

"You bet," Danny replied vaguely, with no intention of doing any such thing. His mind was racing.

_I know January 15th. That's his birthday. Every year, me and Stella take him out to Sullivan's for drinks to celebrate. He always goes with a smile, but he's never completely there, never tuned in to the conversation. He sits at the bar and sips his pint, and sometimes he laughs at a joke, but his eyes are distant, turned in another direction entirely. Like he's lookin' at somethin' that happened a long time ago. Or that he wished had happened but never did. After a couple hours, he always slides off the stool and says he's gotta get home, but I don't think that's where he goes. I think he follows ghosts._

_Christmas is easy, too. Everybody remembers the dead on Christmas. But I don't get March 12th or October 31st._

He had planned on reading the file there in the evidence room, but the desk clerk was peering avidly in his direction like an undercover looky-lou, one horny finger lazily massaging the side of his nostril with the intimate promise of deeper contact. So he fled the unwanted scrutiny and headed for the unwelcoming, stone belly of the file room, a scraped and carved hollow in the bowels of the building that had somehow escaped the razing claws of the remodeler's chisel. Along the way, he stopped at a vending machine and bought a Fig Newton in a hand-me-down wrapper and stuffed it absently into the front pocket of his labcoat.

The file room was cramped and dark and smelled of mold and rotting paper. Boxes were stacked into teetering, dangerously-listing towers in every corner. They spilled out into the middle of the room in a haphazard jumble, and many had disgorged their moldering contents onto the floor, disemboweled and faceless corpses giving testimony and confessions that no longer mattered. Here and there, the fleshless, steel skeletons of industrial shelving jutted from the darkness like bones, and a single, seventy-watt bulb dangled from the ceiling like a jaundiced uvula.

He had hoped there'd be a chair to sit in, or maybe a rickety table, but there was no table, and the only chair was a rusty, leprous folding chair whose seat was so badly warped that it reminded him of a harelip or diseased, lolling tongue. So he sat cross-legged on the floor in the bleary corona of light afforded by the dangling uvula, concealed from the door by a wall of boxes. He set the box on the floor in front of him, but made no move to open it.

_That's right, Messer, _Sonny sneered. _Hide away in here like the rat you are. Sin is always done in secret. Ain't that what the Church fathers told you in catechism class? Well, they was right, cause here you are, sittin' in the dark and doin' somethin' perverse. You're pokin' your nose in business that don't concern you, with a fake Fig Newton in your pocket like a pack of rubbers. So go on, Messer, do your dirty deed and jerk off all over your cop friend's private life._

_Since when did you become my fuckin' conscience, Sassone? _he snarled, but it was impotent bravado, and his shoulders slumped as he pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger.

_Your conscience? Nah, I just like watchin' you squirm. You do it so well._

_There's still time, _Louie said suddenly. _You ain't done nothin' you can't take back yet. The lid's still on the box, and the secret is still safe. All you gotta do is carry that box back to the evidence room and leave it there. And while you're at it, toss that brick of shit outta your pocket before you eat it without realizin' and give yourself the runs. That's all there is to it, all you gotta do._

Except he couldn't. He'd gone too far to turn back now. The true measure of a man was whether or not he finished the things he started. His old man had told him that when he was a kid, and while most of what came out of his father's mouth was happy horseshit inspired by too much booze and a bad day at the track, that had stuck and taken root in his mind. Maybe because Louie had said it, too, and Louie wasn't a piece of shit. He swallowed with an audible click, crossed himself without knowing he had done so, and opened the box.

The smell of old paper, cardboard, and plastic hit his nose, and he blinked at the dust that rose from the box like an uneasy spirit. The papers Flack had placed on top the night Danny had found him asleep at his desk were on top. He lifted them out and set them to the side, and then he examined the rest of the contents. There were dozens of plastic bags inside, as well as small, manila trace envelopes sealed with red tape and a CSI's faded signature.

"Oh, Jesus." The words were harsh and bitter against his teeth, and they fell from his lips like pebbles, numb and disbelieving.

_Not a cop. Cops don't wear lavender socks. She was just a little girl._

He lifted the socks from the box with trembling hands and held them by the edge of the evidence bag into which gloved hands had carefully packed them. The name scrawled on the seal was one he did not recognize, and it did not matter. The socks sat in the center of the bag in a gaudy, lavender lump, and in the sickly light of the bare bulb, they reminded him of an excised tumor. His gorge rose in his clenching throat, and he quickly put them down.

He sifted through the other items in the box. A silver cross. A charm bracelet. A pair of jeans. An ID. He lifted the ID to the light, and when he saw the face looking back at him, all the breath left his body. He had seen those eyes before, still saw them almost every day, as a matter of fact.

_Not a wife or a girlfriend. It's his fuckin' sister. _

His baby sister, if the ID was to be believed. According to it, Flack, Diana E. had been fourteen the day she died. The face in the photograph was thin and narrow, and he suspected that from the neck down, she had been gangly and awkward, Shaggy to Flack's Fred. The eyes were just like her brother's, though, deep blue and dancing with wicked sarcasm.

He cupped the ID in his palm and forced himself to breathe normally. His heart was thudding painfully against his ribcage, and his veins simmered with a mixture of confusion and affronted bewilderment. Why hadn't Flack ever told him about this?

_I don't think he told anybody, if it's any consolation, _Louie said. _I bet you could take that box to Stella or Mac, and they'd be just as surprised. Dependin' on how she died, it ain't somethin' you talk about over beer and a ballgame._

_How she died. _The thought resonated inside his head like the tolling of a bell. He could find out; the answers were in the stack of papers he had set aside, no doubt, but he wasn't sure he wanted to. He knew how people died when they wound up in a box like this, and he didn't want to see Flack's baby sister with her brains splattered all over the kitchen floor or her guts smeared on the highway, and he most definitely didn't want to see her with her panties stuffed into her mouth and her genitalia mangled.

_Then don't look._

But he had to. The curiosity was a ravenous, ruthless creature, stronger than the appalled realization in his gut. If he didn't find out how this terrible story ended, it would never let him rest. It would follow him to his dreams and mingle with memories of Louie when he could still walk and talk. It would lodge behind his eyes like a speck of dust and color everything he saw. While the pen in his hand would write the name of a new vic left to them courtesy of the worst and rottenest of the city, his ears would hear the name of an older one by far, preserved in the eroding amber of a cardboard box and plastic evidence bags.

He picked up the file folder and set it on his lap, fingers curled around the sharp, uneven edges of paper that nipped like warning teeth. _Do Not Open. Hazardous Material Inside._

_Oh, Danny. _Louie, soft and mournful inside his head. _This is one story you never shoulda started._

"I know, Lou. I know," he answered, but he opened the folder.

The investigation from both ends had been thorough. The cops on the street had done right by one of their own and taken special care not to contaminate the scene. Interviews with witnesses and suspects had been well-documented and typed in triplicate, and some enterprising clerk had splotched the pages of the originals with liberal applications of White Out. The crime scene photos were stark and clear, yet oddly reverent, as though the finger on the shutter had been keenly aware that the body on the dusty floor was that of a department princess.

The photos of Diana were not the gruesome testimonies to savagery that he had feared. In fact, she was unmarked. Her clothes were intact, and the only evidence of trauma was the improbable angle of her neck. Had it not been so clearly broken, he would have thought her a carefully arranged doll, a modern-day Sleeping Beauty who had fallen asleep before ascending the stairs to await her prince. Kind hands had closed her eyes before the photos were taken.

It was the photos of Flack that disturbed him. They were as brutal as Diana's were gentle, stark black-and-white and glaring color. His face, pinched and shocked in the starburst of the flash, eyes wide and dazed. A purple bruise bloomed on his chin and cheek, and as Danny examined the photo more closely, he recognized the individual petals of fingers. His arms, pale and thin, but unmarked. His chest and back, broadening with the imminent threat of manhood. His belly. His thighs. His genitals. His buttocks.

It was too much, too intimately perverse, and he turned the photos facedown on the floor and clapped his hand to his dry, burning mouth. He tore off his glasses and scrubbed at his eyes with the back of his hand, and when that made him feel no calmer, he ran his fingers through his hair and scrubbed the nape of his neck.

"They thought you did somethin' to her, didn't they?" he said weakly. "They thought maybe you molested her and pushed her down the stairs to hide what you'd been doin'."

He laughed. It was sick and perverse, but he couldn't help it. It was either that, or lose it altogether. Don Flack would no more have laid a malicious hand on his baby sister than he would have raised his hand to a woman or a child. He had carried beaten children to his squad car and wrapped them in his own coat while they waited for CPS. He'd sat with them in interrogation rooms and brought them hot chocolate or small toys to play with while they waited for their parents or worked up the nerve to tell him what Daddy had done to Mommy on Tuesday night.

_You remember that case a few years back, the one where some sicko raped a twelve-year-old girl, bludgeoned her, stabbed her to death, and dumped her into the dumpster behind his building like old takeout? You and Mac and Flack got called to that one, and Flack…_

_Flack always went hard after scumbags who hurt kids, but that one was intense even for him. He tried to hide it while he worked the scene, but the muscle in his jaw kept twitching, and he was grippin' the edges of his notebook so tight that his knuckles were white. He went to Sullivan's that night and got absolutely hammered, and he was back at his desk six hours later, mainlinin' the swill that passed for coffee and runnin' down every lead that crossed his desk._

_It took three weeks, but you and Mac found the guy through a cold hit in CODIS. The slimebag had done it before in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. That little girl had been seven. You barely had time to give Flack the news before he was off to pick the guy up, lunch forgotten on his desk. Flack came draggin' the guy in an hour later, teeth bared in a triumphant snarl. Flack was too good a cop to ever blackjack a perp, but you wondered, just for minute, because you'd never seen such a focused loathing before._

_You and Mac and the DNA on the little girl's thighs and underwear had the needle in the perp's arm, but it wasn't enough for Flack. Not that time. He was obsessed with a confession. He locked himself in the interrogation room with him and hounded him for hours. He paced the room and pounded the table, and near the end, eight hours after he went in, he seized the guy by the collar of his shirt and shook him like a terrier with a rat, eyes blazin' inside his flushed face. He'd screamed himself hoarse hours ago, but his rage was indifferent to the frailties of the flesh, and he just kept screamin'._

_You ain't never forgot what happened next. Flack was nose to nose with the perp, shakin' him and screamin, callin' him a sick son of a bitch, and then he said, _You know you did it, I know you fuckin' did it, and you're gonna tell me you did it, you sick bastard, or so help me, God, I'm gonna break your fuckin' neck.

_As soon as the phrase _break your fuckin' neck _was out of his mouth, everything changed. He froze, fingers fisted in the fabric of the scumbucket's shirt. All the color drained from his face, and his mouth worked uselessly. For a second there, you thought he was havin' a seizure, and then he tossed the terrified perp into his seat and left the interrogation room without another word. He disappeared into the bathroom and came out fifteen minutes later, still pale as milk, but otherwise okay again. You and Mac both asked him what the hell had happened in there, but he never answered the question, and you've always wondered. Now you know._

He felt a dull nausea in the pit of his stomach, sickened with the weight of revelation. The acquisition of knowledge had lost its furtive thrill, but his hands moved of their own volition to pick up the police reports. He thumbed through the coroner's report, which told him what he already knew. Diana Flack, born March 12, 1979, had died on October 31, 1993, of a broken neck. There were preliminary police reports and eyewitness statements, a statement from the first officer on the scene, who happened to be one Don Flack, Sr., and at the bottom, the sworn statement of Don Flack, Jr., aged sixteen.

The language was clinical and filled with police jargon, but Danny sensed the underlying hysteria, the unspoken mantra of _Oh, God, it's not real; it can't be. Please, God, don't let it be real. _He could see Flack in his mind's eye, sixteen and scared to death, with snot on his upper lip and blood drying on his chin from where his old man had popped him in the mouth. His palms were sweaty and his knuckles were white on the grimy tabletop.

_Of course you can sense 'em. You prayed the same prayers while you sat by Louie's bedside. You and God hadn't been on speaking terms in a long time, but old grudges went out the window when it came to your brother. He might have considered you a loser and a fuck-up, but he was the only brother you had, and you would have danced with the Devil if it meant Louie had a chance. You prayed prayers only half-remembered from childhood, and on one desperate night when Flack wasn't there to distract you, you went to the hospital chapel and knelt before the altar. You cajoled and bargained and raged, and underneath all of them was the same refrain: _Oh, God, it's not real; it can't be. Please, God, don't let it be real.

_That first night in the hospital with Louie, Flack stayed with you. Yeah, Mac ordered him to, but he would have stayed anyway. He sat in a chair outside Louie's room, flipping through old _Reader's Digests _and _Sports Illustrateds, _and when his legs got crampy and numb from long hours of inactivity, he'd pace a lumbering circuit up one side of the hall and down the other, a soldier on watch._

_Sometimes you'd leave Louie's room just to get away from the sight of Louie's caved-in head and swollen eyes and the insidious, creeping stink of plastic tubing and piss in a bag. Most of the time, Flack just let you be and pretended to give a shit about a book review fifteen years out of date, but on one particularly frenetic foray beyond the confines of the plastic menagerie, when you were rubbing your nape and trembling with the effort of keeping your guts on the inside of your skin, he looked at you and said, _Hang in there, Messer, all right? It may not seem like much now, but at least you still got him, still got a chance.

He wondered, thinking back on that conversation with the skeletons from the Flack family closet arrayed in an untidy pile on his lap, if there hadn't been a wistful note in that clumsily-offered comfort, if those blue eyes hadn't darkened and turned away before the last words were finished. He couldn't be sure. So much of those first days following Louie's beating had been lost to the fog of fatigue and confusion, and the frantic, all-consuming desire to simply forget.

_Would you be fuckin' surprised if there was? _Louie asked. _He lost his baby sister. Not only did he lose her, but for a couple of hours there, his father thought he had a hand in it. Based on those photos there, they conducted a full body search. Can you imagine bein' sixteen and standin' naked in front of your father and his friends while some asshole took pictures? Havin' to hold your balls up while your sister was on a slab down the morgue?_

No, he couldn't, nor did he want to. "Oh. Oh, God," he moaned. "Oh, man, I never shoulda, I never shoulda-," He gathered the photos and the reports and stuffed them unceremoniously into the folder.

_What's the matter there, Messer? _crowed Sassone. _Opened Pandora's box, and now you don't like what you see?_

He tossed the folder into the evidence box, closed the lid, and got to his feet. It was going back to the evidence vault, and he was going to let it go if he had to drink himself blind to do it. He was nearly to the door when Flack appeared in the threshold.

"What the fuck you doin' down here, Messer? Mac's been lookin' all over for you."

If he'd have acted naturally, it might never have happened, but he froze. "Flack, hey, I was just, uh-,"

Flack's gaze drifted to the box cradled to his chest like stolen treasure, and his faint, perplexed smile faded. "You son of a bitch," he said conversationally.

"Look, I was just tryin-," That was as far as he got before Flack's fist connected with his nose with a solid crunch.

Pain exploded in his face as his nose smashed flat against his face and the rim of his glasses cut into the tender skin just below his eye. He dropped the box and staggered against a nearby shelf, hand clapped to his nose to catch the gout of blood and save his glasses. Boxes packed haphazardly on the rickety shelving rained down around him and exploded like bombs, blinding him with a mad, whirling profusion of paper. He slipped on a splayed manila folder and sat down hard. The jolt sent another bolt of pain up his stunned tailbone and into his face.

_Fucker hit me, _he thought incredulously, and his own hand curled into a fist in preparation for the next attack.

But there was none. Flack simply crouched next to the overturned box and began to pick up the contents. He paused when he saw the bulging file folder. "For fuck's sake. You couldn't even be bothered to take care'a her. You had no right, Messer, no goddamned, fuckin' right." He opened the folder and shuffled through the jumbled papers and photos, rearranging them with pained care. He stopped on a photo of his sister lying at the bottom of the stairs, and his thumb drew a gentle circle over her face.

"Her?" It was glottal, clogged with blood and ruined cartilage, and each movement of his facial muscles inspired a fresh wave of agony. "It's just a case file with pictures."

Flack's face hardened, and his expression was wooden. "It's my fuckin' sister." Each word was cold and articulated with carefully-crafted precision. He closed the manila folder with a snap and placed it inside the box. "How would you fuckin' like it if I did Louie like this? Just tossed him around like old junk?"

"Flack-,"

Flack rounded on him so suddenly that he recoiled and struck the back of his head on the hard spar of shelving. "It's all I have left'a her, Messer, all that's left'a her life is in this miserable, piece'a-shit box. She deserves better than that, better than fuckin' _this_." He gestured at the cluttered room behind him with a contemptuous wave of his arm. "She deserves respect, and if you can't understand that, you can go fuck yourself." Anger had brought the New York in him to the surface, and his accent was so thick it would have been unintelligible to anyone who didn't call the city home.

"Flack, your sister ain't in that box," he countered gently. "She's gone to somewhere better than here."

Flack's eyes darkened, and he pivoted away from him with a grimace. The soles of his shoes scraped the grit as he turned to the box again. "No," he said flatly to the opposite wall. "She didn't." He picked up the box and rose to his feet.

"Where you goin' with that?" he asked. He knew he should shut up, but talking was better than sitting here on his ass with a broken nose and his eyes swelling shut with every blink.

"None of your goddamned business," he snapped.

"That's evidence," he protested. "You can't just walk outta here with evidence. That's a felony. You could lose your badge."

Flack turned to survey him as he sat in a pile of papers and soft cardboard. "Who's gonna turn me in, Messer? You?" There was neither threat nor arrogance in it. It was a simple question. "'Sides, it's not evidence. Her death was ruled undetermined-accidental or…su-self-inflicted. These are her personal effects. I'm her fuckin' brother, and I can fuckin' take 'em."

"Ain't your father-?"

Flack's lips thinned. "You don't know nothin' about it."

"If it's closed, why is the box still here? Tell me that."

"That ain't your business, either." He tucked the box beneath his arm and rubbed his side before opening the door. "Leave it alone. Just visit Louie and thank God you got somethin' to hang on to." He left without looking back, and Danny noticed the limp.

_He's hurtin'. He's hurtin' so bad,_ he thought, and Flack had been gone a long time before he rose from the pile of papers and went to tell Mac that he needed to go to the emergency room because he'd walked into a door.


	3. Brothers

Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places, and events are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.

**A/N: **Contains spoilers for S1 and S2.

He had expected an apology the next day, but none was forthcoming. In fact, Flack refused to speak to him at all. When they met in the locker room the next afternoon, Flack brushed past him without so much as a glance in his direction, eyes to the front and fingers curled around a styrofoam cup of stationhouse coffee. The indifference was worse than the punch itself, and the anger that had first seeded itself behind his breastbone as he sat in the emergency room with wads of cotton stuffed up his ruined nose had only grown in the night. By the time he'd come to the lab this morning, it had been a hot hammerspike of tension behind his eyes and at the base of his skull, and no matter what he did, a single thought fluttered at his temples like a pulse.

_Bastard hit me. _

It was shock as much as anger. For all his bluster and screaming at the Knicks when they dropped the ball and everything else on the court, Flack was remarkably easygoing, cool under pressure and the last guy to rise to perps' bait in the interrogation room. Sure, things got a little heated once in a while on the blacktop court across from the precinct or at the pool tables down at Sullivan's, but they were supposed to. It was controlled chaos, a chance to blow off some steam without anybody getting hurt, and if by chance a line got crossed-a hard elbow to the chest on the courts or a snide remark about someone's mother over the smooth velvet of the pool table-there were always apologies sweetened by a glass of beer and a slap on the back. Flack was the first to admit when he'd been a prick, and as far as his friends went, he was the last to hold a grudge.

So yesterday had come completely out of left field. He'd known Flack for six years, and he'd never lost control like that, not even with dirtbag perps who tried to grab him by the balls in a bid for escape or bitten him on the calf as he wrestled them to the ground. He'd skated the line now and then-the day he'd threatened to break the child-killer's neck came to mind-but he'd never lost control, never let his emotions overrule common sense and endanger the badge he'd busted his ass for all these years.

_He didn't lose control yesterday, neither, _Louie pointed out matter-of-factly. _Naw. In fact, he was as calm as you please when he punched you dead in the fuckin' face. One shot. Boom. He coulda kept kickin' your ass if he'd wanted to, probably coulda gotten you a matchin' bed right next to mine in the rehab hospital. But he didn't. He didn't 'cause that shot to the face was a reflex bite, an animal snappin' at an unwanted intrusion. Your fingers were gropin' in an open wound he's been coverin' up for a long time, and he just wanted you to stop and get the fuck away from him. As soon as you were no longer a threat to his sister's box, he stepped over you and took her where you couldn't hurt her no more._

_Hurt her? That's fuckin' crazy, Louie. I can't hurt her. She's dead._

Not for him, she ain't. And she ain't never gonna be. He sees her everywhere he goes 'cause she's got his face and his eyes. She's always gonna be fourteen to him, and he's always gonna be sixteen and chasin' a sister he can't follow. You know what I'm talkin' about, don't you, Dan?

Yes, he did, and the thought of it made his chest cramp and his bruised, swollen eyes sting. Sometimes when he visited Louie in the hospital and gazed bleakly into that ravaged, vacant face, he caught glimpses of the old Louie, the one who could walk and talk and wipe his own ass, and who, when Danny was ten, had taught him dirty limericks in the dirty, cramped room they shared to ease the pain of his smarting mouth where Pop had exacted his ounce of flesh for some imagined wrong.

Sometimes the Louie he saw was a kid, eight years old with dirt smudged on his cheek and a cocksure, shit-eating grin on his face. That Louie used to pin a toddling Danny to the floor and Indian-burn him until he screamed and Ma came in to break it up with a dishtowel snap to the ass. That Louie had also carried him out of the house during his father's furious rampages and sat with him on the stoop, entertaining him with brightly-colored dice from an old board game and stopping his pudgy, baby fingers from putting them into his mouth like killing candies.

Sometimes he was fifteen and shoving an eager Danny away from him and his friends, all snarling, wounding mouth and tarry, acrid breath. That Louie wore leather jackets stolen from the back of truck in the garment district and greased his hair to the viscosity of a wet pussy, but that Louie had also gone to blows with Pop over whether or not Danny was going to follow in the family business. That had cost him a molar and a permanently crooked nose, but it had kept Danny from becoming a runner for his old man's bookie.

Sometimes he was twenty-two and smoking Lucky strikes while he handed a hooker a hundred bucks and told her to make his little brother a man. That Louie had sent him into a cheap motel room with a rubber and a hearty clap on the back, but when Danny had emerged from the hotel room twenty minutes later, shaken and sick with adrenaline and shame because he'd been too appalled by the sight of the hooker's artificially lubed and world-weary cunt to do anything more than make a beeline for the reeking, stopped-up toilet to heave his guts, that Louie hadn't scoffed at him and called him a limp-dick pussy. Instead, he'd taken him for a beer and told him that he'd probably spared himself a terminal case of the Clap.

Still other times, he was twenty-six and sending Danny fifty bucks so he could eat while he studied Criminology and chemistry at Syracuse. It always came in an envelope that smelled of Ma's furniture polish and Louie's cheap cigarettes, and Danny would tuck the bills into the pocket of his jeans and head to the diner on West 53rd where he washed dishes to pay the bills. Back then, he'd simply been grateful for the money and never stopped to consider where it had come from, but now he wondered if it hadn't been money from Sonny Sassone's coffers as payment for a body well buried. The idea of Sonny Sassone being responsible in any measure for his college education made him want to laugh and puke at the same time.

Sometimes-and this was the most painful of all-he was the Louie who might have been, the Louie he had lost to misguided protection. When he saw that face looking out at him, it was too much, and he could only rise from the ugly, vinyl chair and leave the room until he got himself together. Louie might be one step above an eggplant now, but Danny was damned if he was going to look like a gutless hairbag in front of him.

_So, that's what you see, _Louie said patiently. _Maybe that's what Flack sees, too. Maybe he looks into that box and sees how things were before she died-puttin' frogs in her backpack, fightin' in the schoolyard 'cause some snaggle-toothed doot-de-doot was givin' her a hard time, goin' to Church to watch her First Communion. Or maybe he sees alla the things he shoulda got to do as her older brother. Maybe he's seein' her in her prom dress or her cap an' gown, or imaginin' her at his graduation from the Academy, clappin' and takin' pictures and tryin' to catch his white gloves as they fluttered to the dirt. _Her _graduation from the Academy, getting to be the proud older brother in his dress blues. Her weddin', standin' in the Church in that godforsaken penguin suit and pretendin' that the guy whose name she took wasn't a Grade-A asshole who could never take care of her the way he could, promisin' himself that if the guy ever laid a hand on her or broke her heart, they'd never find what was left of him again. Her babies, and bein' Uncle Donnie, who let 'em play with the lights on the patrol car. Maybe what he's got in the box are faded yesterdays and broken tomorrows, and he don't wanna let 'em go._

After yesterday, the odds of knowing what Flack saw when he looked into the Box of Moldering Papers were slim and Kiss My Angry Mick Ass, and anyway, thinking about it made his nose throb.

"Danny? What are you doing here? I thought I told you to take a few days off until the swelling went down."

Mac's voice made him jump, and he winced at the miserable flare in his face. "Ah, Jesus Christ, Mac!" he yelped. "You scared the shit outta me."

Mac stood in the doorway, forearm propped against the doorframe. A ballpoint pen dangled loosely between two fingers, and he swung it in a lazy, pendulous arc. "Sorry," he said, but there was a trace of amusement in his voice. Then he sobered. "What _are_ you doing here, Danny? You're off the schedule for the next three days."

"Oh, yeah, I know," he answered nonchalantly. "I know. I didn't figure on getting' paid, if that's what you're worried about." Nervous and a little truculent.

"No," Mac said evenly, "that's not what I'm worried about." Danny was secretly elated until Mac added, "I'm more concerned about the possibility of blood from your broken nose contaminating evidence."

"Oh. 'Course you are," he said bitterly, and turned away from him in his seat. "'Course. 'Cause, you know, bein' a hothead, I wouldn't have the sense to stay the fuck clear of the evidence and just catch up on the backlog of paperwork."

"I never said that." Danny couldn't see him, but Mac sounded pained.

"You didn't have to, Mac. Even with my eyes swollen shut, I can read between the lines. So, I'll just be over here, doin' paperwork and stayin' outta your way."

"Danny…" Mac trailed off and tried a new tack. "Can you see?" he asked shrewdly.

"What? Fuck, Mac. Of course I can see. You honestly think I'd come in here and jeopardize our chances of puttin' some scumbag away? Unbelievable." He reached up to scrub his face with his hands, thought better of it, and ran his hands through his close-cropped hair, interlacing his fingers behind his burning nape.

"Of course not. I just-," Mac came into the room and closed the door. "How's your nose?" Mac nodded in the direction of his face.

"'S'aright," he answered dismissively. "Hurt like a motherfucker last night, but it's not too bad now. That Aleve's some good stuff. Don't know if it's worth fifteen bucks a fuckin' bottle, though."

"I imagine it did. You want to tell me how you really got it?" Mac sat on the edge of the table and tugged absently at the leg of his pants to smooth a crease in the fabric.

Danny feigned surprise and confusion. "What are you talkin' about? I told you. I walked into a door while I was readin' the DNA results on the Fitzgibbon robbery homicide case."

"I know what you told me," Mac replied calmly. "Now I want the truth."

"The truth? That _is _the fuckin' truth, Mac. Why does everything gotta be a fuckin' conspiracy with you? I wasn't payin' attention. I walked into a door. I looked like an asshole in the emergency room. End of story." He slapped his palm with the back of his fingers to emphasize the point.

"All right. Which door?"

"The door to the ballistics lab. Why? What difference does it make?"

"The door to the ballistics lab would require a ninety-degree turn from the hallway that leads from the DNA lab. You're telling me you took a ninety-degree turn without even glancing up to see where you were going?"

Danny shrugged. "Yeah. So? What's the big deal? You and Stella could walk this place blindfolded."

"Danny," Mac countered impatiently.

"What? You don't believe me? Fine. G'head and swab every door in here if it makes you happy."

His heart was racing, and the adrenaline was sour in his mouth. If Mac found out the door he'd walked into had been named Flack, the department would take Flack's badge again and send him back to that useless shrink who was too nosy and wore too much perfume. Danny had been at her mercy twice in two years, and the hours he'd spent engulfed in the musky, sweet smell of dog piss and academic pretension had been worse than the slow-motion nightmares after the Minhas shooting.

_All he's got is that badge. No girlfriend, no lover. It was just the lab who went to see him in the hospital. You remember because Stella stormed into the lab one morning, pissed because neither of his parents had bothered to see him. Stella fuckin' pitched a tent in there, like she thought she could will him to a faster recovery. She says his badge was the first thing he asked for when he opened his eyes, and she couldn't give it to him because it had been taken into evidence._

_He loses that badge, and he's got nothin'. Disability don't pay for shit, and the money don't replace the rush of knowin' you're out there, protectin' decent people from losers and scumbags. People who got nothin' don't live long. You've seen it yourself. Yeah, the job eats you alive and leaves behind nothin' but bitterness and burst veins in your nose, but it's a drug every cop needs to survive, worse than smack or speed or crack. If you lose it before you're ready to let it go, you'll drive yourself crazy tryin' to get it back again and thinkin' of all the mighta-beens if they'da stayed on just one more year, one more month. More cops eat their gun the month after retirement than kill themselves on the job. The job doesn't end with the badge, and they spend every day after they turn it in lookin' for its weight on their chest or hip. You don't let go of the job. It lets go of you, and more often than not, partin' ain't sweet sorrow._

He thought of Aiden then, who had set her gun and her badge on Mac's desk and told him with a straight face that she couldn't do it anymore. But the job wasn't finished with her yet, and she had done it some more. She'd applied for her P.I. license and watched D.J Pratt from the shadows, chasing leads and the rumors of leads and searching for answers by the light of her desk lamp and the comparison microscope she'd found on Ebay. She wanted to run him to ground before she laid the job to rest, but it was her who had been laid to rest. He'd carried her there himself, one numb shoulder balancing the cherry casket while his eyes and throat burned and his stomach heaved at the thought of what was in it.

_That's what this is about, isn't it? _Louie marveled incredulously. _This is about Aiden. You think that if you help Flack, you won't have to close your eyes and see Stella scrapin' what was left of her out of the car with a spatula and a dental pick. You won't have to smell burning fat and think of Aiden as she turned to bone and ash and seeped into the upholstery. Maybe if you fix Flack, you can stop tellin' yourself that things woulda been different if you'd just called more or gone to her place once in while. If you had, maybe you woulda seen what she was doin' and coulda talked her out of it or at least offered backup. But the dinner plans you made came too late, and you never saw the pictures plastered on the wall or the slides she'd so painstakingly collected. You never got a chance to say stop, so now you're gonna catch Flack before he tumbles over the edge._

_You're goddamned right, I am, Louie, _he snapped to himself. _My whole life, everybody I care about has gone to shit. Pop's drinkin' himself to death, and Ma thinks it's my fault what happened to you. You're gonna be laughin' at your Jell-O for the rest of your life, and my partner burned to death in a stolen car because I wasn't there to look out for her. Now my best friend is witherin' to dust inside his clothes and holdin' vigils for the dead when he should be asleep. He's the last chance I got to do somethin' right._

"I saw the blood on Flack's knuckles, Danny."

_Shit. _"How d'you know it was from me?" he countered, dimly aware that he sounded like a whiny twelve-year-old trying to explain the pot in his dresser drawer. _That ain't mine, Pop, I swear._

"I don't," Mac answered simply. "But I saw the blood and your face and made the connection."

"'Course you did." He sighed. "Mac, I swear to God that it's not what you think. You gotta listen to me, Mac. If you report him for strikin' a fellow officer, the cocksuckers at IAB'll have his badge, and even if he gets it back he'll be ridin' a desk for the rest of his career. For God's sake, don't do that to him, Mac. He's hangin' on so goddamned tight right now by the tips of his fingernails. If he loses his badge, Mac, you mark my fuckin' words, we'll be hosin' his brains off the walls of his apartment."

He stopped and curled his fingers around the edges of his chair in a white-knuckled grip. Fuck, he'd just been rambling like a jonesing suspect. _That _would certainly persuade Mac that there was nothing to see here. Messer the Wonderfuck-up had struck again. Fuck. Fuck. _Fuck. _He fought the urge to laugh in self-reproach.

Mac held up his hands. "No one is talking about turning him in for anything, Danny. I just want to know what happened."

"Mac…I can't," Danny said helplessly.

"Off the record," Mac coaxed. "I'm not asking as your boss."

"Off the record?" Danny repeated dubiously.

Mac gave a single nod. "You have my word."

Danny relaxed. Mac's word was as good as a signed contract. He straightened in his chair and allowed himself the luxury of a stretch before he spoke. "Yeah, off the record I can do." He stretched his toes inside his shoes. "First off, Mac, it was my fault. You gotta understand that."

"Your fault how?" Mac replied cautiously.

"Well, see, I was comin' down the hallway there outside of the bullpen, you know? It was late-after midnight-and I saw a light on in there. So, I go in to take a look, and there's Flack, asleep at his desk six hours after he was supposed to go home. I was surprised as fuck to see him there, so I go over to wake him up, and there's this evidence box at his desk. It made me curious, so I ask him about it when he wakes up. I figure maybe I can help him out. Only he don't want my help, tells me to leave it alone. I backed off, told him I would, but I didn't. The next day, I go into the property room, check out the box…" Danny shrugged. "Flack found me in there lookin' it over, and he busted me in the face. One shot. Boom, done."

"Flack hit you over a case," Mac said slowly. "What case was this, Danny?"

Danny stiffened. "No, Mac."

Mac blinked. "No, what?"

Danny shook his head. "I ain't gonna tell you which case it was. It's not important."

"Not important?" Mac repeated. "With all due respect, Danny, you don't get to decide what's important in this lab. I do. And if Flack is unstable and tampering with evidence from investigations-,"

"Tamperin'?" Danny interrupted furiously. "Who said anythin' about tamperin', Mac, 'cause it sure as hell wasn't me. What's the matter with you? You think that since Aid-since one of us admitted the thought's crossed our minds, we all do it as a daily exercise now? Jesus Christ. Everything in that box was sealed and in its proper order. It was just sittin' on his desk. 'Sides, it wasn't an open investigation. It was a closed case from-never mind when it was from," he finished abruptly. "Just take consolation that it was an old, closed file."

Mac narrowed his eyes, and Danny suspected that there was a headache forming behind them. "If the case is closed, then what is the evidence still doing here? It should have been destroyed or returned to the family."

_That's the thing, Mac. It never left the family. _"Beats me. He said it was personal."

"Personal?" Sharp, alarmed. "This lab can't afford any more personal cases. A personal case is what cost Aiden her life."

Mac was right, and even as his brain processed the statement, he knew it, but the wound was too fresh, too raw, and Mac had no right to treat it like it was Aiden's fault.

_You had no goddamned right, _the Flack of yesterday muttered inside his head, crouching over the spilled papers of his sister's file and gathering them in his hands. _Christ, Messer, you couldn't even be bothered to take care of her._

Danny leapt from his seat and slammed his palms on the table. "Don't you dare blame Aiden for what happened to her, Mac. Don't you fuckin' dare." He was furious, and red danced on the periphery of his vision like blood in water.

"Da-,"

"Naw, Mac, naw." Danny shook his head and began to pace, hands opening and closing into bloodless fists in time to his harsh breathing. "Aiden was nothin' but a goddamned victim in alla this. Pratt's a fuckin' scumbag, and he don't deserve to be getting' three squares in prison while she rots in the ground. You wanna blame somebody? Blame him. Or better yet, blame us, because we hadn'ta turned our backs on her, maybe she'd be alive now."

"Blame me, you mean," Mac corrected dully. "Because I'm the one who fired her."

_He blames himself for what happened. He probably has since her face turned up on that digital recreation. He doesn't say nothin' 'cause of Semper Fi and all that crap, but he probably sits in his office and shuffles the papers on his desk and wonders if he coulda done somethin' different, if he coulda stopped it by takin' Pratt's weasely little lawyer more seriously._

"Naw, naw, Mac," he said hastily. "That ain't what I meant." But the protest was sad and empty because it was _precisely _what he had meant to say, and they both knew it. Danny could only stare miserably at him from behind the smudged lenses of his glasses and wish for a hole in the ground to swallow him up.

"Do you feel," Mac said after a long, ugly silence during which they looked anywhere but at each other, "that Flack poses a danger to himself or others in the field?"

"No," Danny answered. "No, I don't. Flack's too good a cop to put others in danger. You know that. The only reason he got blown up is 'cause that numbnut was listenin' to his Ipod too goddamned loud. And lemme tell you somethin', Mac. I wouldn't be surprised if that's half the reason he's so fuckin' pissed off. I would be, too, if I'd almost gone to meet my Maker on the strains of Barry Manilow's greatest hits."

Mac gaped at him for a moment and then uttered a short bark of laughter. "I think he would have preferred Zeppelin, honestly," he said drily.

"Doobie Brothers," he murmured absently. "He likes the Doobie Brothers." Then, torn between amusement and shame that he was laughing while the world fell apart, "Fuck, Mac. Just…fuck."

Mac laid a reassuring hand on his shoulder. He'll be all right, Danny. Just give him time."

"It ain't the bombin' that's botherin' him," he said suddenly.

"What do you mean?"

"It's a ghost."

Mac only looked at him. "We all have ghosts, Danny. Some more than others," he said at last, and he wasn't laughing anymore.


	4. Sisters

Flack was still chasing his ghost two weeks later when Danny spotted him at Sullivan's. He was hunched on a bar stool, with his elbows propped on the bar and the tongue of his rumpled tie lolling disconsolately near the lip of his stein. He was thinner and gaunter than ever, and he curled both hands around the glass as though it were anchoring him to the world of the upright.

Flack hadn't spoken to him since he'd broken his nose, but Danny slid onto the stool beside him and ordered a longneck with an upraised finger. "You look like shit," he said mildly.

Flack spared him a sidelong glance. "I ain't got nothin' to say to you, Messer," he grunted, and took a large gulp of ale.

"That's fine. Don't change the fact that you look like shit."

Flack snorted and lifted his stein to his mouth again. The wrist protruding from the sleeve of his coat was spindly and pale, and Danny was sure that if he touched it, it would be hard and cool as mausoleum marble.

"Have you eaten anything today?" he demanded.

Flack's eyes narrowed. "Not that it's any of your fuckin' business, but yeah." He scowled at the big-screen TV above the bar, whereupon Dan Patrick was demonizing George Steinbrenner with solemn glee. "Fuckin' jackoff," he muttered sullenly into his ale.

Danny wasn't sure if he meant Patrick or him, but he pressed on. "What was it?" he prodded.

"What was what? What I ate? An egg-salad sandwich from the deli over on 23rd. Had a pickle, too. Wasn't supposed to have the pickle for another week or so, but fuck the doctor. I'm tired of fuckin' baby food. The fuckin' cashier at the grocery store must think I'm some kind of pervert, comin' up to her lane with nothin' but Gerber and applesauce and chocolate puddin."

"Did you keep it down?" Danny asked shrewdly.

"Fuck you, Messer," he snapped, but he refused to meet his gaze.

"'S what I thought. Listen, Flack, if you're havin' complications, you need to-," he began, but Flack cut him off in mid-sentence with a ruthless horizontal chop of his hand.

"What I fuckin' _need_," he hissed, "is for you and everybody else to stay outta my personal business and let me do my goddamned job. Since the day I got back, everybody's been wringin' their hands and walkin' on eggshells and breathin' down my neck, waitin' for me to fall apart. Then this mornin', I get wind that they're thinkin' of assignin' another detective to you nerds 'cause they think I can't pull my weight anymore. It's bullshit. _Bullshit_." He pounded on the bar with his palm. "Fuck 'em," he said bitterly, and drained his stein in three long swallows. He signaled for another.

"I ain't sayin' you can't pull your weight Danny protested. "I'm just sayin' maybe you oughta keep your doctor informed of what's goin' on with you. I've been noticin' you rubbin' your side all the time."

Flack scowled at him. "I don't need no more fuckin' doctors. I'm through lettin' 'em root around in my guts and head like a goddamn rummage sale." He held out his hand to stop the refilled stein as it slid down the bar.

"Flack, I think-,"

"I don't give a fuck what you think, Messer," he snapped. "I stopped givin' a shit about that at about 3:45 in the afternoon two weeks ago. So go fuck yourself and get outta my face. You know what? Forget it. _I'll _leave. 'Less you think I'm incapable of crossin' the room by myself."

With that, Flack slipped off the stool and made his way to a booth in the far corner. Halfway there, his hand stole to his side and began to knead in restless circles. He slipped into the booth with a wince and a grimace, set his drink on the table, and rested his head against the dirty, glass window of the bar. His back was to the mounted television set, and he looked at the passing cars and pedestrians beyond the pane with exhausted disinterest.

Danny made no move to follow him. Flack was too raw, and if he pushed him too hard, their fellow officers would be taking them in for drunk and disorderly. Even at this distance, he could see the tension in him, the endless current of sour adrenaline that had been coursing through his bloodstream since his first day back on the job. It was in the restless twitch of his fingers around the molded glass of the stein handle and the working of his jaw muscles as he ground his teeth. The teeth-grinding was a new habit since the explosion. Mac had done it, too, for a while, but his had stopped after Flack was released from the hospital. Flack's had only gotten worse, and Danny could have told him that therein lay the road to dental ruin.

He had started grinding his own teeth when he was four. It was a family trait, he supposed, because Louie had done it, too, and sometimes when Pop's tirades were exceptionally bad, he and Louie would sit on the stoop with a deck of cards and grind in tandem, the sound a subtle, scraping vibration in the skin of his jaw and the tender meat of his gums. Sometimes, it would last for hours as the sun sank behind the buildings like a truculent, bloodshot eye, and Louie would laugh and slap a dog-eared card onto the discard pile and say, "Roll dem bones, Danny boy. Roll dem bones."

The grinding made little difference on his milk teeth, which began their exodus from his bodily temple when he was six. They earned him fifty cents underneath his pillow every time, though later, when the repository of unexpected riches was down to the final few precious bits of enamel, he'd wondered if he might have gotten more had he not worn them to preternatural smoothness. It was a moot speculation, however, since the last of his childhood currency had tumbled onto the sidewalk one sweltering afternoon with the portentous click of rolling dice.

_Roll dem bones, Danny boy,_ he'd thought, and he'd picked it up and slipped it into the pocket of his jeans. The next morning, there'd been fifty cents underneath his pillow and the inexplicable smell of his mother's perfume, and the tooth fairy had never come again.

The grinding became a problem with the advent of his permanent teeth. A big one, to the tune of three fillings, a root canal, and a crown by the time he was fifteen. His mother implored both him and Louie to stop in the name of the strained family finances, and his dentist had turned a blissfully blind eye to the problem in the same name. Louie left home when Danny was seventeen, and three more fillings followed by Christmas. His exasperated father had dubbed his mouth the "money pit."

Things had gotten better for a while after he'd left home after high school. Sure, he'd nearly starved that first year of college, washing dishes at a greasy spoon and being so hungry that the scraps on the plate tempted him, but there was no more yelling in the middle of the night, and no more gaggle of overweight men in ill-fitting suits gathered around the kitchen table at three in the morning, reeking of cigar smoke and expensive silk. Only two minor fillings those years, and sometimes he went whole weeks without grinding.

Then the first year of Academy, and all progress had been lost. He'd obsessed over leash laws and garbage regulations for the State and city of New York, studying until the wee hours of the morning and keeping himself awake by the sliding grate of enamel on enamel. He ground his way through exam reviews and exams themselves, and while his pencils remained unmarred by bite marks, his mouth was a mess. The week before graduation, a molar had abscessed in the middle of the night, and he'd spent an agonizing morning in the dentist's waiting room, clutching his throbbing jaw and praying for a dropped appointment. Two thousand dollars and a wad of medical gauze later, he'd emerged sporting a root canal and four fillings in the bottom of his mouth.

He'd been hiding Louie that first year on the beat, grinding him to powder between molars and bicuspids. The constant shift and scrape between sips of coffee or bites of dog had been a comforting white noise as he walked or cruised his beat, a secondary heartbeat that assured him his secret was safe. As long as his teeth were in motion, his lips were sealed.

By the time Mac had recruited him for the lab seven years ago, all but one of his teeth were held together by silver putty paste and dental ingenuity, and more than half concealed tiny steel posts within their carefully reconstructed facades. The threat of Louie coming home to roost in the lab had been infinitesimal, or so he had thought, and his teeth and jaws had grown lax in the past few years. And then Sonny Sassone had waltzed into Mac's interrogation room with trace amounts of Paul Montenassi embedded in his flawless smile, and his iron grip on the past had faltered.

That had been the beginning of the end, now that he thought about it. Sonny had invaded the life he had made for himself beyond the shadows cast by Louie and his father, a rapacious, grinning pestilence who had brought darkness and misery in his wake on a whiff of Drakar Noir. Stella and Mac and Flack had been in the room with him, and little more than a year later, their worlds had collapsed with the unforgiving abruptness of a supernova. Stella had found the wolf in sheep's clothing and escaped his snare only because she had the balls to slice her fingertips with a razor blade and pump three rounds into his heartless chest; Mac had nearly blown up alongside Flack and seen his protégé come back to the lab in a bodybag, burned beyond recognition; and Flack, Flack had been lain bare and was still trying to put the pieces together again even though there would always be one missing now, a piece of his gut that the surgeon had taken as his pound of flesh.

Flack's fingers were still searching for that missing piece, groping and fumbling blindly for what he knew should be there. Danny could see them in his mind's eye, kneading the curve between his last rib and the jut of his hipbone. Sometimes, he would catch fleeting glimmers of confusion in Flack's eyes as he squatted over a DB or secured a suspect's apartment for a search, dazed and bewildered as his fingers sought out smooth skin and found only divots and runnelled, wattled flesh.

_Where am I? _his face would say, _where have I gone?_ Then Flack would catch him looking, and his expression would smooth to a scrupulous blankness. He was Humpty Dumpty, in pursuit of a piece the king's men had carried away in tribute.

_Oh, yeah?_ Sonny jeered, but it was listless, as though his subconscious mind no longer had the energy to render a true-to-life representation. _Where does that leave you? If your pal over there is Humpty Dumpty tyin' one on, who're you?_

That was easy, Danny thought as he took a sip of beer that tasted of sawdust. That left him with a brother who seldom recognized him and broken dolls wearing his friends' faces. Each of them tried to pretend that everything was still okay, but he could see the hairline fractures beneath the skin, the bruises beneath the eyes that Stella's makeup didn't quite cover. He doubted any of them were sleeping worth a shit. He knew he wasn't. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw Louie's ruined face or Aiden's fleshless teeth, perfect even in the rigors of death and hideously white against the charred blackness of her skull. Even the normally imperturbable Hawkes was subdued and wan and rough around the edges.

_They're all eggmen, _he thought stupidly. _Guess that makes me the fuckin' walrus. Koo-koo-ga-choo._ He laughed, a leaden bark that held no amusement whatsoever, and the occupant of a nearby stool, a leathery barfly with a map of Staten Island etched into his cheeks and the bridge of his nose, spared him a rheumy, sidelong glower and put another stool between them. Danny took another pull of beer.

As for who that made him, that was easy, too. He was the walrus, or maybe he was the idiot peasant left in the wake of the royal horses as they departed the scene on the sound of thunder, standing in the dust and the bits of shell and the yellow pool of yolk. Maybe he was the guy left to pick up the pieces when everyone else got tired of playing cop. He stood in the dust cloud in his leather jerkin, and when no one was looking, he squatted in the dirt and picked up the mess.

Or if that analogy didn't work, maybe he was Little Bo Peep in a jockstrap. Only he couldn't find his trusty shepherd's crook, and some dirty-fighting bastard had blinded him. His sheep had been scattered, but one by one, they had all come home again, battered and scarred and sometimes missing tufts of wool, but blessedly alive and sturdy. All but one.

That one had always been stubborn, more mule than timid sheep, but that was why he had loved him best. Now that same willfulness that had so endeared him to Danny and made him one of the best cops to ever put on the blue threatened to overwhelm him. The wounds he was hiding beneath his button-downs and his barbed tongue were infected, and the infection was spreading. It was in his gut and his eyes now, simmering with wet, virulent heat, and he suspected that it was stretching greedy, feverish tendrils in the direction of his heart.

_You've got it backwards, Dan, _said Louie. _The sickness didn't start in his gut and spread from there. It started in his heart. It's been incubatin' there since he was sixteen. Maybe it started in the interrogation room when he was holdin' up his balls for the camera, or maybe it happened when he was sittin' in a church pew and tryin' to come to grips with the realization that his family was forever short by one. Either way, it took root then and buried itself deep._

_Bein' a cop made it easier. Catchin' dirtbags and perverts and skels was his antibiotic, and as long as he could right somebody else's wrong, it was all okay. His sister might not be here no more, but he'd make sure somebody else's was. It was his way of makin' amends. A life saved for a life lost. Then Lessing blew him almost to Kingdom Come, and the infection that had been sleepin' in his heart roused itself and spread to his vulnerable places, which were all of 'em, thanks to that prick and his dirty bomb._

_It might not have been so bad even then, 'cept he was laid up in the hospital with no way to keep it at bay. All he could do was fuckin' lie there with a tube in his johnson and listen to his piss dribble into a plastic bladder danglin' at the edge of his bed. He got to lie there while the nurses and orderlies handled him like a slab of breathin' meat, and lemme tell you, Dan, my man, when you're lyin' there with an orderly's gloved hand shoved up the crack'a your ass wearin' a loofah the texture of steel wool, you do a whole lotta thinkin'. It don't take no genius to know what he thought about. She was fourteen years old and thirteen years dead._

Danny was sure Flack's parents thought about her, too. That would explain why they never turned up to see him at the hospital even though both Mac and Stella had called half a dozen times. As far as they were concerned, he'd been thirteen years dead, too, buried at the same time and in the same hole as his sister in a ceremony they never bothered to attend.

Danny nursed his drink and Flack nursed his, and as the hours passed and the shadows lengthened, Flack trudged from his booth to the bar and back again, clutching steins of ale and longnecks and Manhattans. He never spared him so much as a cursory glance on these treks, just shouldered his way to the bar, propped his elbows on the smooth, damp-ringed wood, and called his order to the barkeep.

After the third visit, the barkeep sidled down the bar, ratty towel slung haphazardly over his shoulder. "Hey, buddy," he said diffidently. "Is your pal all right?" He flushed and studied the gleaming tap of his guinness dispenser, as though he'd committed an act of gross impertinence by asking.

"Why you askin'?" Danny responded carefully.

The barkeep's mortified flush intensified, and he snatched the towel from his shoulder and began to dust the bar in sloppy, ineffectual circles. "'S nothin' and none'a my business, and I shouldn'ta asked," he mumbled quickly. "I dunno. Shit," he finished eloquently, and retreated down the bar with a lopsided, apologetic shrug.

Danny knew what he meant. Flack liked drinks with the team after work, but he'd never been a boozer. It was three or four longnecks, maybe a beer and a cocktail or a couple of shots. He never got so wasted that he couldn't walk or talk, and it was a rare night that he made more than three trips to the bar. Danny had been here going on two hours, and Flack had been here three times. God knew how long Flack had been here before he showed up, and only God and the bartender knew how many pints he'd downed. He thought about asking the latter, but decided against it. He didn't want to draw any more attention to Flack than Flack already had.

He wasn't surprised that the barkeep had noticed the change in pattern; the old guy was an ex-cop, and he'd been minding the bar for fifteen years. It was his way of staying close to the job since turning in his shield, and he was usually on the bar when they came in. Now he just had to pray that Mac didn't notice. If he caught wind that Flack was down here giving his liver a therapeutic booze bath, the whole business about being off-the-record would fly right out the window.

_Maybe it's just a one-time thing, _he thought with quiet desperation.

_Only one way to find out, _Louie suggested.

Danny fortified himself with a swallow of beer and squared his shoulders. "Hey, buddy," he called to the bartender, who was pouring a jigger of bourbon for a cop who had just come in off the beat. "C'mere."

The bartender finished pouring the shot and ambled over, the neck of heavy glass decanter clutched in one beefy hand. "What can I do for ya?"

Danny jerked his chin in the direction of Flack's booth. "My friend there been comin' in here and drinkin' like that all the time?"

The bartender spared Flack a discreet glance and leaned forward, elbows propped on the bar. "Naw, I don't think so. Last time I remember seein' him in here was-," He stopped to consider, swinging the decanter in a lazy arc parallel to the bar. "-A couple'a weeks ago with you. "Yeah, yeah. That was it. Ya came in an hour before last call."

Danny nodded, and the knot of tension that had been massing in his chest at the thought of Flack becoming a falling-down drunk released with an audible crackle of tendon. "Thanks. And hey, I'll have another one of these." He held up his empty bottle.

"Sure thing," the bartender said, and reached beneath the bar for another beer.

That was good. That was somethin'. Whatever was eating Flack, he wasn't helping it along with the demon drink. One less thing he had to hide from Mac, who had taken to watching Flack more closely than ever since Danny's confession. Stella was, too, and between the two of them, Flack couldn't take a dump without one of them watching him from the corner of their eye. It would have-did-driven him crazy, but Flack appeared not to notice the scrutiny, or if he did, he gave a great show of not giving a shit. He came on shift, did his sworn duty as an officer of the State of New York, and went home again without saying a word to anyone beyond what was required by the job at hand.

_He's just tyin' one on, is all,_ he told himself with dizzy relief, and took a long, cooling swallow of beer. _Hell, I would, too, if I got wind that the higher-ups were sendin' another detective onto my turf so soon after I got back on the job. He probably sees it as a threat to his position and a knock on his ability to do his job._

Shit, it probably was, at least the latter. The fatcats at One Police Plaza had gone soft without the streets to keep them hard and lean, and because they'd gone soft, they assumed everyone else was, too. That's why they were so quick to yank a cop off the streets after an accident and swaddle him in layers of psychobabble bullshit. That was their cure-all for everything from flesh wounds to being stabbed in the head by your wife when you came home and found her blowin' some crackhead while takin' it up the ass from his partner in crime. It was all a bunch of useless ass-covering as far as he and the other rank-and-file were concerned. The best cure for what ailed a wounded cop was another shift, another shot at getting a scumbag off the street.

His relief lasted until Flack's fifth trip to the bar, when he returned to his seat with a boilermaker. He had also, Danny noticed with sinking, sour-mouthed dismay, acquired an appreciable list. Danny watched him weave his way back to his booth, body wobbling as it searched for its displaced center of gravity. He sat down with a graceless flop, and the boilermaker sloshed onto his hand.

"Fuck," Flack told the bland surface of his table. The table said nothing.

"Shit." The word was heavy and gritty on his tongue, and bitter as partially dissolved aspirin.

The barkeep was on the periphery of his vision. "Hey, uh, buddy," came the hesitant summons, and Danny smelled spearmint gum and stale cigarettes.

"Yeah?" He didn't turn around. He kept watching Flack, who held the boilermaker in both hands and took dainty, unsteady sips, a toddler with a bowl of hot soup.

"Hey, look, I don't mean to be an asshole, and I, uh, I appreciate the job you guys do for the city and alla that, but I'm gonna have to cut your pal there off. He's a great guy from what I've talked to him, but he's three sheets to the wind goin' on four, and I can't afford to have him stirrin' up trouble."

"He ain't gonna cause any trouble," Danny murmured. "But don't worry about it. I'll take care'a him from here on out. You probably did him a favor."

"Hey, thanks, buddy. I hope there ain't no hard feelin's when he sobers up."

Danny grabbed his half-empty beer and slid off the stool. Flack was still staring at the tabletop when he got there, seemingly mesmerized by his distorted reflection in the puddle of water and spilled booze on the table. He didn't look up at Danny's approach. Danny wasn't even sure he was aware of his presence until Flack spoke.

"Fuck off," he said. "I told you I don't have nothin' to say to you."

"And yet, here you are, talkin' away," Danny said breezily, and sat down opposite him.

"Real fuckin' cute," Flack muttered. He wasn't quite slurring yet, but the boundaries between words were muzzy and indistinct, as though he were teetering on the brink of sleep or unconsciousness.

"The ladies seem to think so."

Silence.

Danny tried again. "So, uh, the headshrinkers done with you yet? Man, I remember when they were on my ass after the Minhas thing, you know? Like fuckin' termites on wood pulp. Bastards wanted to know everything, asked about my mother, my Pop, when I was potty-trained, for Chrissakes. Only thing they didn't ask about was the first time I got a hard-on, and I'm thinkin' that was only 'cause they didn't have time. You get the chick psychiatrist? Nice tits, but her hips were too broad, and that perfume she was wearin' smelled like dog piss."

"Are you fuckin' done with the heart-to-heart?" Flack snarled suddenly. "'Cause if you are, I'd like to get back to my drink." He picked up his boilermaker and took a sloppy, gulping swallow. Liquid dribbled from the corner of his mouth in a glistening trickle.

_Just like Louie,_ he thought with swooning horror as he watched the trail creep sluggishly down his chin and drip onto the tabletop. _Louie's always droolin' out his drink now, too, only it's water or milk now instead'a Jager or Beam. By the time dinner's over, his chin is coated in the stuff, and sometimes there mashed potatoes and chewed peas on there, too._

_His eyes are like Louie's, too, vacant and glazed, open, but not seein' anythin'. Nothin' in this world anyway._

"Are you sleepin' all right?" Danny asked, and his gaze flickered over Flack's red-rimmed, scalded eyes.

Flack lowered his glass and wiped the corner of his mouth with three unsteady fingers. "Why you wanna know? You gonna come over and sing me a fuckin' lullaby if I ain't?" He smirked, but there was no playfulness in it. It was hard and cruel and ugly, a tight spasm of his normally soft lips.

"Dammit, Flack, why you gotta be such a fuckin' asshole, huh? I'm just tryin' to help you here."

"Yeah?" That ugly smirk again. "Well, maybe I don't need your help."

"The fuck you don't," Danny spat, and slammed his palm on the table hard enough to make the glasses rattle. "Look at you. You're a fuckin' mess. Your clothes are hangin' offa ya, you look like you haven't eaten in days or slept in weeks, and you're fuckin' wasted."

"All right," Flack said with an insouciant shrug. "Maybe I don't _want_ your help."

Danny snorted. "Frankly, I don't give a damn what you want right about now."

A brittle bark of laughter. "Yeah, there seems to be a lot of that goin' around lately," he muttered, and quaffed more of his drink.

Danny fought the urge to slap the glass from his hand. "Jesus fuck, Flack," he said in disgust. "What the fuck is wrong with you? You think you're the only guy who ever lost somebody they loved? Louie-,"

"Louie ain't nothin' like-like…" He stopped and clenched his jaw and fist in unison.

"Like your sister?" Danny finished for him? "Naw, he ain't. Your sister found peace. My brother's a livin' corpse, like somethin' out of the Dawn of the fuckin' Dead. 'Least you got good memories. Mine? They get wiped out every time I walk into that room and smell shit 'cause the nurses never bothered to change him before I got there. I've changed him myself a couple'a times, and it's a special kind of hell, changin' the brother who used to change you. So don't you fuckin' try to tell me that you cornered the fuckin' market."

"You don't know shit, Messer, so do yourself a favor and shut up." Flack's hands were curled into white-knuckled fists on the table.

"What you gonna do if I don't? You gonna hit me again?" he challenged.

"Shut up," Flack repeated, and a hand slithered bonelessly from the table to massage his side.

Maybe it was adrenaline, or maybe it was the undercurrent of raw emotion that eddied around the booth in a palpable, pulsating wave, but the now-familiar gesture irritated him out of all proportion. "Will you fuckin' stop doin' that?" he exclaimed. If your side still hurts you so damn bad, why don't you fuckin' swallow your pride and take a goddamned pi-,"

"Because I can't _remember_ her!" Flack bellowed, and the din of relaxed conversation around them came to an abrupt and complete halt. Several curious heads turned in their direction, and from behind the bar came the furtive clink of shifting glassware as the bartender busied himself with rearranging his inventory.

Flack was staring at him, eyes wide and anguished behind the sheen of alcohol. His chest was heaving, and his breath was labored and desperate, as if he were on the verge of tears, a monumental revelation, or both. He knew he should feel guilty for inspiring such a look of unguarded misery on his best friend's face, but he could feel only a giddy, drunken relief.

_His eyes ain't like Louie's anymore, lifeless and dull and painted into their sockets. What he's feelin' may hurt, but at least he's feelin'._

"I can't remember her when I take the pills," he repeated softly, and the hum of incidental conversation resumed, timorous in the beginning, as though they expected another outburst, but growing in confidence when none was forthcoming. "When I woke up in the hospital after-I couldn't remember her face. It was a total blank. I could remember her lavender socks and the red-hooded sweatshirt she used to wear all the time. It was her favorite, and she kept wearin' it even after she outgrew it. But I couldn't remember her face. Not a goddamned thing. And that's fucked up, Danny; that's so fuckin' fucked up because her face was mine. Only a little more, you know…" Flack gestured vaguely at the contours of his face.

"Feminine?" he offered cautiously. The last thing he needed was for a drunk and emotional Flack to decide he was leering at his dead sister.

"Yeah," Flack agreed. "Yeah, I guess." He scrubbed his face with his palms. "She had my face, and I couldn't remember her."

_Oh, fuck, _he thought bleakly as Flack stared at him in thin-lipped silence, eyes beseeching and raw and full of unshed grief and anguish. _He's askin' me to help him even if he don't know it, and I don't think I can. Where's Mac when you need 'im, or Hawkes?_

He found himself looking past Flack to the other patrons of the bar, hoping against to see a familiar face or profile, but there was no one. There was only him and his stupid, muddled brain and Flack staring at him with clouded eyes. He cleared his throat, drummed a nonsense staccato on the table, and pushed his glasses onto the bridge of his nose.

"You were doped out the ass after that surgery," he offered lamely. "I doubt you remembered your own name there for a while."

Flack snorted. Yeah, well, maybe," he said. His voice was grating and thick. "But then I got home and took those fuckin' pills, and I couldn't, I couldn't remember her, either."

"Don-,"

"The worst part?" Don continued as though he hadn't heard. "The worst part was that I liked not remembering, not havin' that hot spot beneath my skin, remindin' me that somethin' was missin'. It didn't hurt, and I was afraid I could get used to not rememberin', so I flushed the pills down the toilet."

Danny took a sip of beer to drown his inadequacy and groped for the right words. "There's nothin' wrong with getting on with your life. It's not forgettin'; it's lettin' go."

"No," Flack said resolutely. "Naw. That's semantics and psychobabble bullshit. It's forgettin', and I ain't gonna do her that way. She was a fuckin' baby, and I'm all she's got to look after her."

"Your parents-,"

"My parents forgot about her," he snarled. "Three months after her funeral, I came home, and everything was gone. Her room had been stripped to the walls, and her chair at the dinner table was gone. Fuck, they even took the pictures offa the walls, and there were these big, blank spaces, like unfilled cavities. My Pop took her things to the Goodwill and the Salvation Army one day, and that was that. Like she never existed. If I tried to talk about her, I got the silent treatment."

Danny stared at the fascinating grain of the tabletop, stunned by the onslaught. It was too much, this baring of Flack's private soul, too scalding when his own soul was riddled with scars and hairline fractures.

_Stop. Please, stop talking. Just stop,_ he thought miserably, and curled his fingers around the bottle in front of him in the fervent hope that its coldness would penetrate the numbness that was settling over him from the ankles up, Novocain injected through the soles of his feet.

_This is what you bought when you opened that box,_ Louie said, and while there was compassion is his voice, there was no pity. _It's yours now, so sack up and take it like a man._

"They wouldn't let me bury her," Flack said suddenly, and his voice strained with the effort of the words. "I was sixteen-plenty fuckin' old enough to do one last thing for her-but you know what my old man said to me?" Flack leaned forward and came within a hair's breadth of toppling his boilermaker. There were no tears, but his eyes were wet, and he was blinking rapidly. "He fuckin'-," He swallowed with an audible click and started again. "He fuckin' told me I'd 'done enough'. Fuckin' prick. I shoulda fuckin' carried her anyway. I shoulda fuckin' dared him to stop me. But I just sat there like a fuckin' pussy, too worried about what he thought of me to even cry for her."

"What kinda worthless son of a bitch don't even have the balls to cry for his own sister?" he asked, hands opening and closing in time to his ragged breathing.

_But you have been cryin' for her. Every day for thirteen years, _he thought, but all he said was, "You, uh, you wanna get outta here?"

Flack blinked. For a moment, Danny was sure he was going to demur in favor of his boilermaker, but then he took a shuddering breath and muttered, "Yeah, okay." He drained the contents of his glass in one long, tremulous swallow and heaved himself to his feet by dint of the table. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and wobbled towards the door. Danny followed unobtrusively in his wake, hands thrust into the shallow pockets of his jeans.

Outside the bar, Flack stood on the sidewalk beneath the green neon sign, swaying slightly, face upturned to the sickly light, eyes closed and mouth open to reveal moist, pink tongue and glistening, white teeth.

"Hey," Danny said softly. "You all right there?"

Flack slowly opened his eyes. "Yeah, I'm good. I just needed some air, is all." But his voice was strengthless and cramped, as though a heavy poultice had settled on his chest.

"All right, then. No problem." Danny patted him on the back. "You just stand there and suck all the wind you want."

"Fuck you, Messer," Flack retorted with fragile amiability, and he started towards home.

Danny shadowed him, mindful not to crowd, but determined to see him home. He was piss-drunk and in no shape to be alone. His feet were unsteady on the solid sidewalk, and more than once, he stumbled over unseen obstacles. Always he walked with his chin tilted skyward and his lips parted, and Danny was reminded of a boy awaiting the tasteless caress of a Communion wafer on his tongue.

They had walked two blocks in the shadowy netherland between night and the beckoning, lascivious fingers of light from the all-night delis and porn shops when Flack said, "She was always talkin'. Sometimes, it was nervous chatter, but most'a the time, it was 'cause she was curious. She was always askin' Ma and Pop and me questions, this little red robin with lavender socks that was always underfoot. I shoulda let her, ya know? But I was an arrogant little prick asshole, and I was always tellin' her to fuck off and go away, and then one day, she did."

And then Flack was on his haunches on the dirty, gritty sidewalk, hands on his knees and head tucked to his chest. A great, whooping gasp, and then, "Aw, fuck. _Fuck._" A coughing bark, another choking gasp, and then he moaned.

_He's gonna be sick, _Danny thought dismally.

_Yeah, he is, _Louie agreed gravely. _But not from the booze. Not yet. That's for the mornin'. This is him tryin' to hold down what's been buried in his gut since the day they put his other half in the ground. It's bitter and painful, and there ain't no home remedy to take the edge off. It'd be a lot easier if he'd let it come, but he won't. Dumb, stubborn bastard's gonna fight it 'til his insides burst. As usual._

The _as usual_ was perversely comforting, and Danny's lips twitched in a fleeting smile as he crouched beside Flack on the sidewalk. This close, Danny could smell the piquant, furniture-varnish reek of alcohol and see minute beads of perspiration in his hairline. He was trembling, and his teeth were bared in a furious, seething grimace. Now and then, his teeth would part and his stomach would tense, and a desperate, shuddering rush of air would escape him. _Unh. Unh. Unh. _Denial and grudging release.

"Hey." He rested his hand on Don's feverish nape. "Hork if you gotta, man. This sidewalk ain't gonna be none the worse for wear."

An aborted squawk of laughter escaped Flack, and he twisted away from the unwanted intimacy of his hand. "Don', Don'," he said thickly, and tottered drunkenly on his heels. He steadied himself, one hand splayed on the grimy concrete.

"All right," Danny said helplessly.

_Unh. Unh. Unh. _A wounded dog bleeding to death on the pavement.

"C'mon. Let's get you home. A hangover is better in your own bathroom."

He gripped Flack beneath the elbow and pulled him to his feet. He expected resistance or a slurred demand to be let go, but the only sign of life from him was the constant, stuttering moan. _Unh. Unh. Unh._ He swayed and then slumped against him, heavy and panting.

Danny blinked, nonplussed at the sudden capitulation, and then his arm slithered around Flack's chest in a clumsy gesture of comfort. He could feel Flack's heartbeat in his forearm, a thudding pulse that was much too fast. Flack groped for him and clutched his wrist with panicky tightness.

"Can't," he moaned. "I can't."

Danny had no idea what he meant, but he nodded and tightened his grip. "Okay. Well, you don't gotta. It's just you'n me out here."

As if to prove him a liar, a passerby wandered by and gawked, head swiveling to take in the sight of two grown men embracing on the sidewalk in the middle of the night.

"What're you lookin' at pal?" Danny snarled, and the curious face disappeared abruptly.

_That's what I fuckin' thought, _he sneered at the rapidly dwindling figure. _Next time it might be your ass he's pullin' from a burning building._

His moment of smug triumph was interrupted by Flack disentangling himself and stumbling away. "Get offa, me. I'm fuckin' all right. Go cop your feel somewhere else."

Danny scowled in spite of himself. "Feel? What you got to feel 'sides a hairy-ass chest?"

Flack didn't answer. In fact, he didn't speak at all until they were within sight of his building, a genteelly shabby high-rise with tiny apartments carved inside like pockets of honeycomb. "A year before she died, I told her I wished she'd never been born," he announced to no one in particular.

Danny's stomach plummeted into his shoes, and he closed his eyes and wished with all his might that Dr. Phil would magically appear and deliver him from this unenviable position by virtue of his college degrees and his patron saint of Oprah Winfrey, but when he opened his eyes again, there was no delivering angel with a Texas drawl and a shiny, bald head, just Flack gazing at the twinkling lights of his building and tilting his chin heavenward in search of an absolution that was never coming.

"Don, I'm sure she knew you didn't mean that," he muttered awkwardly, and ran his fingers through his hair."

"Oh, she knew, all right. That's why in that house, she-sh-she-,"

He never found out what Diana Elizabeth Flack had done in the haunted house that lived and grew vibrant in his best friend's imagination, because in the next instant, Flack pitched forward onto his hands and knees and vomited into the gutter with a rancid, wet splatter. Flack's back was to him, and so he was mercifully spared the sight of clotted puke as it splashed onto the asphalt and dribbled into the gutter, but he could hear it, and his own stomach heaved and slalomed in sympathy.

_Even when he's sick, he's lookin' out for the good citizens of New York, _he thought stupidly as he watched Flack struggle with a spasm that pulled his face to within inches of the age-blackened sewer grate. _Bet that heavin's gotta be hell on his stomach._

The retching was violent and endless and continued long after his tortured insides had emptied. The dry heaves were worse than the wet splashes, guttural groans pulled from his gut, razing tender flesh as they came. Eventually, the fit passed, and Flack clung weakly to a nearby fire hydrant, swiping his mouth with the back of his trembling hand and gasping for lungfuls of the humid night air.

Danny managed to get him home without further incident, though Flack was nearly dead weight as he led him up the stairs with one arm slung around his shoulders for support. The retching had stilled his tongue, and now the only sound he made was that terrible _unh unh unh. _He was simultaneously unbearably heavy and perversely light as Danny half-carried him down the narrow hallway to his apartment, as though his insides had been hollowed out and filled with sawdust.

_Or straw, _his mind supplied helpfully. _I'm walkin' with the damn scarecrow from _The Wizard of Oz.

_That ain't a Grimm's fairy tale, _Louie pointed out.

_Who gives a fuck?_ he countered irritably. _Works for me. 'Sides, when did you become a Rhodes Scholar of fuckin' literature?_

"We're almost there," he reassured Flack as he fumbled in the latter's pockets for his keys. "I hope nobody from your floor comes around right now, 'cause it sure as fuck looks like I'm givin' you a handjob."

Flack's only response was a phlegmatic, inarticulate grunt. "I was such an asshole to her," he told Danny dully. When I was ten, my Pop took me to a ballgame, but he didn't take her. Guess it was his attempt at father-son bonding. Anyways, she was upset, so I promised I'd buy her a box'a Cracker Jacks from the park. I did, too. Ponied up with my own pocket money."

"What's the matter with that?" Danny asked absently as he shouldered open the door.

"I ate 'em all on the way home."

"Oh." Such a useless, idiotic syllable, but he had exhausted his meager store of comforting platitudes, and his bones were leaden and stiff inside his skin.

He dragged Flack inside with the intention of depositing him onto the couch and collapsing into the nearest armchair, but the familiar surroundings galvanized Flack, and he wobbled free of his supporting arm and tottered into the dark kitchen.

Danny groped for the light switch. "Hey, what you doin'?" he asked. His fingers grazed worn plastic, and he flipped the switch.

The front hallway and part of the small living room were illuminated in milky, yellow light, and if he squinted, he could see Flack rummaging in a cupboard over the sink.

"What're you doin?" he repeated suspiciously when he heard the telltale clink of jostling glassware. "What're you lookin' for?"

When no answer was forthcoming, he crept into the kitchen, hands out and fingers questing like a blind man's. He bumped into the doorframe with his shoulder, and he planted his hand on the knobbled stucco of the wall and crept eastward, a pale spider in search of prey. His fingers found plastic, hard and smooth as a beetle's carapace, and a moment later, the kitchen was awash in light.

Flack was standing at the counter, opening a bottle of scotch.

"Oh, hey. I don't think that's such a hot idea," Danny said dubiously. "You already left the first batch in the gutter out there."

"Yeah?" Flack croaked. "Well, I thought we establish that I don't give a fuck what you think."

"All right, fine. Suit your fuckin' self, then." Danny raised his palms in surrender.

Flack smirked and took a gurgling swig of scotch.

Danny stuffed his hands into the pockets of his jeans and wandered into the living room. The air was close and stank of stale sweat, old newspapers, and the lingering scent of takeout grease. Three days' worth of newspapers were scattered over the small coffee table, along with six empty beer bottles. Diana Flack's ID was propped against one, still in its plastic evidence bag. Of the other personal effects, there was no sign.

Flack stumbled around him, still clutching the bottle of scotch. He shuffled to the couch, tossed a throw pillow aside, and sat down with an undignified flop. "What're you still doin' here?" he asked.

"I don't know," he answered honestly, and sat down in an armchair.

He was exhausted. A tension headache throbbed behind his eyes like an impacted tooth, and his eyes burned with the effort of seeing too much and not enough all at once. He rubbed his nape and rolled his shoulders to ease the simmering knot of tension between his shoulder blades. He groaned and let his head sag against the back of the chair. He had almost dozed off when Flack's voice startled him into grudging wakefulness.

"She was there in the hospital with me," he said.

Danny yawned and rubbed his eyes. "Who?"

"My sister. She came when I was…out. She was wearin' that little red-hooded sweatshirt. She came into the room, and she told me I could go with her now if I wanted. I didn't have to, but I could. Then she held my hand and said she'd wait while I made up my mind. Her hand was warm, and it fit just right, even though mine was bigger now." He took another pull of scotch. He was crying, but Danny suspected he was unaware of the tears streaming down his face.

"When I started to come to, I got excited because I could feel a hand, and I thought, I thought it was her, that she had followed me back somehow. When I opened my eyes, I was sure I'd see her lookin' down at me. But it was just fuckin' _Mac_." Flack's voice broke. It was bereft, almost accusatory.

"'S funny. I've been visitin' her grave four times a year for thirteen years and sayin' a rosary for her every Christmas, and it took me wakin' up in the hospital without her to realize that she was really-," His Adam's apple bobbed precariously. "-Really gone. If she existed anywhere in the fuckin' world, Diana woulda walked through fire to get to me, and when I woke up with Mac's pasty face lookin' down at me, that's when I finally understood she was dead."

There was a beat of absolute silence, and then Flack exploded. "Fuck!" he bellowed, and threw the bottle of scotch across the room. It struck the TV and shattered the dusty screen in a shower of glass and sparks. "Fuck!" he shouted again, and kicked the coffee table onto its side. The table upended with a portentous, creaking groan, and the beer bottles slid onto the floor and broke. Diana's ID slid slowly into the puddle of broken glass, where it lay, Diana smiling beatifically at her brother through thirteen lost years.

_Do something, _urged a voice inside his head, but he was unequipped to deal with the catastrophic emotional hemorrhage unfolding before him, and he could only sit rooted to his chair in stupefied silence.

_Call Stella, _prompted the voice. _She'll know what to do. _

_And say what? Hey, Stel, this is Messer. Listen, I poked in somethin' that was none'a my business, and now Flack's losin' his fuckin' mind. He's taken out the tube and the coffee table, and I'm afraid that if he remembers there's a Glock on his hip, his brains might be next. You mind comin' over to help me clean up the mess?_

"I want my fuckin' sister," Flack screamed at him, as if he thought Danny had spirited her away for spite.

_Of course he does, _Louie said dolefully. _Family's who you go to when the wounds get too deep. You mighta thought I hated your guts for all these years, but you still came runnin' when the chips were down. Blood calls to blood, and even death can't quench that longin'. If she was here, she'd be the one fussin' over him and comin' over to fix his dressin's and nag him into doin' his rehab and cookin' him dinner instead of lettin' him eat shitty takeout. She'd be the one he calls when the nightmares awaken him from a dead sleep and leave him retchin' over the side of the bed. But she ain't here, and he feels what he's missin', the phantom limb that ain't never comin' back._

"I want my fuckin' sister," Flack repeated. Entreating and dazed, a little boy looking for his mother in the midst of a dark and terrible wood.

"I know you do," Danny managed. The lump in his throat made it difficult to breathe. "I know."

He did, too. Every time he saw Louie, slouched and drooling in a chair in the sunroom that grew human vegetables, he had the same thought, was overcome by the same helpless sense of monumental injustice. He wanted his brother back, wanted to see him swagger from the hospital in a stolen leather jacket, with a Lucky Strike dangling from the corner of his mouth. He wanted the pat on the back and the ruffling of his hair, and with every day that passed without those things, his rage deepened.

Flack sank to his knees in the middle of the wreckage, heedless of the shards of broken glass. He groped for his sister's ID and picked it up, smoothing away drops of flat beer and spilled scotch.

"Shit," he slurred, and as his fingers curled around the ID, he began to cry, hard, wracking sobs wrenched from his gut. It was loud and ugly, and Danny was struck with the notion that he was performing an indecent act by bearing witness to this private bloodletting.

_So do something, asshole, _demanded the voice. _Be there for him. He's your best fuckin' friend. Mac, the crusty, hardass Marine managed to suck it up and be there for you._

But he wasn't Mac. Nowhere close. If he were Mac, he never would have let it get this far. He turned and went into the kitchen, pushing his glasses onto the bridge of his nose and telling himself that Flack wouldn't want him to see him like that anyway. He resolutely ignored the leering voice of Sonny Sassone at the base of his brain, calling him a coward and a pussy.

When he came back to the living room a few minutes later with a broom, dustpan mop, and bucket, Flack was still weeping, but it was quieter now. Danny wordlessly set the bucket down and began sweeping up the largest shards. Flack sat on his heels in the middle of the wreckage, his sister's ID still fisted in his hand.

"I don't know why I didn't go with her," he said.

_That's the thing, buddy, _Danny thought as he swept pieces of the broken scotch bottle into the dustpan, _I think you did. A long time ago._

But he couldn't say that to his friend who was sitting on a pile of broken glass and splintered wood with a picture of his dead sister in his hand, so he said nothing. He just kept sweeping long after the carpet was clean, and whenever Flack's free hand stole to his side to massage the wound there, Danny knew what he was looking for.

He also, he thought grimly as he dragged the bristles across the carpet, knew where it had gone, and the old nursery rhyme was right. All the king's horses and all the king's men would never put Humpty Dumpty together again.


End file.
